But if this Church, possessing this Divine Sacrifice and Sacrament, was a wonder to minds such as St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine in their day of the fifth century, what ought it to be to us at the end of the nineteenth? The Roman Empire broke up, and the tribes of the North dashed into fragments its unrivalled organisation, and destroyed that peace under which the fairest regions of the earth, washed by the inland sea, dwelt for centuries, rich in all the arts of commerce, in all the security of civilisation. The Blessed Eucharist survived this convulsion; far more, it restored this ruin. By founding religious houses through the whole extent of the countries occupied by the German tribes, whose indwellers, in virtue of it, lived _the common life_ under the safeguard of the three great vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it produced a Christian France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and Poland out of the torn and bleeding members of the Empire. This was its work in the Western half of the Roman broken statue. In the Eastern the savage power of the Mahometan Califate arose, denying at once the redemption of Christ, and the sacrifice in which He had enshrined that redemption, and the divine banquet which ensued upon it. Thousands of Christian Sees fell not before its persuasive power, but its ruthless sword of conquest. The Mahometan Califate has for hundreds of years trampled on the fairest regions of the earth, and turned the Roman peace into a desolation. At length it trembles for its existence; the divine Eucharist remains unimpaired in strength, and is ready to enter into the desolated territory and repeat its work of restoration, to turn the foulness of the Mahometan harem into the sanctity of the Christian home. Again, when iniquity abounded and the love of many had waxed cold, there arose a defection in the West as terrible as that of the East 900 years before, and it was marked by special enmity to the Blessed Eucharist. It cast down and trampled under the feet of those who approached the desecrated churches the very altars at which for a thousand years the generations of a Christian people had worshipped. It denied the great mystery which was the heart of the doctrine; it enrolled the denial in the coronation oath of its sovereigns; it abolished the belief which had soothed all sorrows as it had made all saints. But that defection has broken into innumerable wavelets against the Rock of the Christian Church, upon which rises, as of old, the impregnable citadel of the faith—the faith which dispenses, as in the first ages, to the children of all the races of the earth that sacred Body and Blood, in virtue of which now, as in the upper chamber, the Word of God declares, "I am the Vine; ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing."