Sweeping across the Alps, the Visigoths paused at last before the gates of Rome. ‘We are many in number and prepared to fight,’ boldly began the ambassadors sent out from the city. ‘Thick grass is easier to mow than thin,’ replied Alaric. Dropping their lofty tone, the ambassadors demanded the price of peace, and on the answer, ‘Your gold and silver, your treasures, all that you have,’ they exclaimed in horror, ‘What then do you leave us?’ ‘Your souls,’ was the mocking rejoinder. After much argument the Visigoths consented to be bought off and retreated northwards, but it was only to return in the summer of the year 410, when Rome after a feeble resistance opened her gates. Her enemies poured in triumph through the streets; but Alaric was no Hun loving slaughter for its own sake, and ordered his troops to respect human life and to spare the churches and the gold and silver vessels that rested on their altars. He spent only a few days in sacking the city and then marched southwards, intending to invade Africa. While his army was embarking, however, he fell ill and died, and so great was his loss that all thought of the campaign was surrendered. Alaric was mourned by his people as a national hero, and, unable to bear the thought that his enemies might one day desecrate his tomb, they dammed up a river in the neighbourhood, and dug a grave for their general deep in its bed. When they had laid his body there, they released the stream into its old course, and so left their hero safe from insult beneath the waters. The sack of Rome that moved the civilized world profoundly made little impression upon the young Emperor. He had named one of his favourite hens after the capital; and when a messenger, haggard with the news he had brought, fell on his knees, gasping, ‘Sire, Rome has perished,’ Honorius only frowned, and replied, ‘Impossible! I fed her myself this morning.’ St. Jerome, in his hermit’s cell at Bethlehem, was stupefied at the fate of the ‘Eternal City’. ‘The world crumbles,’ he said. ‘There is no created work that rust or age does not consume: but Rome! Who could have believed that, raised by her victories above the universe, she would one day fall?’ Why had Rome fallen? This was the question on everybody’s lips. We know to-day that the process of her corruption had been working for centuries; but men and women rarely see what is going on around them, and some began to murmur that the old gods of Olympus were angry because their religion had been forsaken. It was affirmed that Christ would save the world, but what had He done to save Rome?