[Sidenote: Contemporaneous changes in Europe.] Europe had made a vast step during its Age of Faith. Spontaneously it had grown through its youth; and the Italians, who had furnished it with many of its ideas, had furnished it also with many of its forms of life. In that respect justice has still to be done them. When Rome broke away from her connexions with Constantinople, a cloud of more than Cimmerian darkness overshadowed Europe. It was occupied by wandering savages. Six hundred years organized it into families, neighbourhoods, cities. Those centuries found it full of bondmen; they left it without a slave. They found it a scene of violence, rapine, lust; they left it the abode of God-fearing men. Where there had been trackless forests, there were innumerable steeples glittering in the sun; where there had been bloody chieftains, drinking out of their enemies' skulls, there were grave ecclesiastics, fathoming the depths of free-will, predestination, election. Investing the clergy with a mysterious superiority, the Church asserted the equality of the laity from the king to the beggar before God. It disregarded wealth and birth, and opened a career for all. Its influence over the family and domestic relations was felt through all classes. It fixed paternity by a previous ceremony; it enforced the rule that a wife passes into the family of her husband, and hence it followed that legitimate children belong to the father, illegitimate to the mother. It compelled women to domestic life, shut them out from the priesthood, and tried to exclude them from government. In a worldly sense, the mistake that Rome committed was this: she attempted to maintain an intellectual immobility in the midst of an advancing social state. She saw not that society could no more be stopped in its career through her mere assertion that it could not and should not move, than that the earth could be checked in its revolution merely because she protested that it was at rest. She tried, first by persuasion and then by force, to arrest the onward movement, but she was overborne, notwithstanding her frantic resistance, by the impetuous current. Very different would it have been had the Italian statesmen boldly put themselves in the van of progress, and, instead of asserting an immutability and infallibility, changed their dogmas and maxims as the progress of events required. Europe need not have waited for Arabs and Jews.