Alexis surely prayed for his native city, but all the prayers of all her Saints could not avert the trials that were to visit on Rome her past sins. Constantine the Great believed that he had left the Church in the West impregnable in strength and assured of peace; and for nearly three centuries after his death she was forced to fight for her existence almost as stubbornly as she had during the three centuries preceding it. In 361, only twenty-four years after the death of Constantine, Julian the Apostate reversed his edicts and strained every nerve to re-establish the worship of the Olympian deities. Paganism was dead, and he failed in his iniquitous efforts to restore animation to its corpse, but much suffering did he bring to the Church, and it was only at the price of blood that she conquered in the end. After Julian came the Barbarians—Alaric, Genseric, Odoacer, Totila—during the short space of one hundred and thirty years Rome was taken and ravaged five separate times, so that when, in 553, Narses, the prototype of Napoleon, abolished the Senate and annexed the city to the Eastern Empire, she had reached the lowest point in her history, and was scarcely regarded as a prize even by the Lombards when, in response to the invitation of Narses himself, they overran Italy from the Alps to the sea, only to be finally expulsed by Charlemagne some two hundred years later. But the Church had realized the truth of the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. The high courage that had come unscathed through such appalling conflicts rose gallant and audacious in its certainty of final victory, and at the very moment when Rome seemed to be annihilated, decreed to it such a triumph as the world had never seen before. In 568, just a year after Narses, to gratify a personal spite, had invited the hornet swarm of Lombards to cross the Alps, he died in the city he had insulted. We must remember that there were two Romes, the corporeal city, depopulated and impoverished, despoiled and dying—the city of the government of the once proud “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” which had failed signally at every point, and had crawled to the feet of every conqueror; and the spiritual city, ruled by strong and holy men who patiently went on with their invisible building, adding stone to stone with such calmness and patience that in contemplating their work one is almost led to believe that they were unconscious of the material ruin around them.