Then, during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era the Angles and Saxons began to flow in from the Continent, bringing with them old Aryan words like _dew_, _night_, _star_, and _wind_, which they had never forgotten, new words which they had coined or developed in their wanderings, and Latin words which they had learnt as provincial subjects of the Roman Empire,[11] bringing, in fact, that peculiar Teutonic variant of the Aryan tongue which forms the rich nucleus of our English vocabulary. Their arrival here was followed almost immediately by their conversion to Christianity; and this moment in our history was a pregnant one for the future of Europe. For now the two great streams of humanity—Teutonic blood from the one side, and from the other the old classical civilization, bearing in its dark womb the strange, new Christian impulse—met. The Latin and Greek words which entered our language at this period are concerned for the most part with the dogma and ritual of the Church; such are _altar_, _candle_, _clerk_, _creed_, _deacon_, _hymn_, _martyr_, _mass_, _nun_, _priest_, _psalm_, _shrine_, _stole_, _temple_, and many others. Far more important was the alteration which now gradually took place in the _meanings_ of many old Teutonic words—words like _heaven_, which had hitherto denoted a ‘canopy’, or _bless_, which had meant to ‘consecrate with blood’. But to this we must return later, when we come to consider what is called the “semantic” history of English words—that is to say, the history of their meanings.