Europe laboured to get out of this state. It is the nature of man to struggle to emerge from such a chaos, even though he has been plunged into it by his own fault. However brutal and ignorant, however much devoted to his own gratification and passions, there is within him a voice or instinct which repeats to him that he is made for something else, that he has another capacity and destiny. In the midst of his disorganisation, a taste for order and advancement pursues and torments him. Longings for justice, for foresight, for development, agitate his breast even under the yoke of the most boorish selfishness. He feels himself urged to reform the material world, society, and himself; and he labours for this object without much cognisance of the want that goads him. Thus the barbarians aspired at civilisation, although utterly incapable of it, I may say, indeed, utterly detesting it, when its restraints were felt. There remained, likewise, some considerable remnants of the Roman civilisation. The name of the Empire, the remembrance of that great and glorious society, agitated the memories of men, especially of the town senators, the bishops, the priests, and of all those who had their origin in the Roman era. Many of the barbarians themselves, or of their barbarian forefathers, had been witnesses of the grandeur of the Empire; they had served in its armies, or fought against it. The image and name of the Roman civilisation had an imposing effect upon them, and they experienced a desire to imitate it, to bring it back, or to preserve some portion of it. In this was an additional stimulus to drive them from the state of barbarism which I have described. There was a third, which suggests itself to every mind--I mean the Christian church. The church was a society regularly constituted, having principles, rules, and discipline of its own, and actuated by an ardent zeal to extend its influence, and to vanquish its conquerors. Among the Christians of that epoch, in the ranks of the clergy, there were men who had pondered deeply upon all moral and political questions, who held fixed opinions and energetic sentiments upon all things, and strove strenuously to propagate them and render them paramount. No society ever made such efforts as did the Christian church, from the fifth to the tenth century, to extend its sphere, and smooth the external world into its own likeness. When we study its particular history, we shall perceive the full extent of its labours. It attacked barbarism, as it were, on all its sides, to civilise by subduing it. {66}