has begun his march, eastward, westward, southward, northward. For a moment he is the heathen lord of Catholic subjects who preferred the worshipper of Woden to the follower of Arius; he is presently to change into the one Catholic power of the whole world, the eldest son of the Church, looked to through all Gaul as the deliverer of Catholic lands from heretical rulers. And, what concerns us more than all, while Gaul, Spain, Africa, have passed away from the Empire, Italy and Rome itself have, in all but name, passed away with them. One barbarian patrician has yielded to another; Theodoric watches over Italy as no Cæsar had watched over it for many a year. A few years more, and his rule stretches, under one title or another, over the whole western half of the Mediterranean lands of Europe. Yet the Roman name, the Roman power, lives on in its Eastern half; the one Emperor of the Romans still holds his throne in the Eastern Rome, keeping but the shadow of a barren title over his elder capital, but biding his time to make that shadow a reality at the first favourable moment. So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins, the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak, the first feeble steps towards coming into being. Let us now glance at the hardly less memorable sixth century, memorable in another way from the fifth. The sixth century is not a creative, but rather a reactionary age, an age which does much to hinder the growth of new elements, and much to bring back old elements to a place and a power which they had lost. Of all ages in history the sixth is the one in which the doctrine that the Roman Empire came to an end at some time in the fifth sounds most grotesque. Again the Roman armies march to victory, to more than victory, to conquest, to conquests more precious than the conquests of Cæsar or of Trajan, to conquests which gave back Rome herself to her own Augustus. We may again be met with the argument that we have ourselves used so often; that the Empire had to win back its lost provinces does indeed prove that it had lost them; but no one seeks to prove that the provinces had not been lost; what the world is loth to understand is that there was still life enough in the Roman power to win them back again. I say the Roman power; what if I said the Roman commonwealth? It may startle some to hear that in the sixth century, nay in the seventh, the most common name for the Empire of Rome is still “respublica.” No epithet is needed; there is no need to say that the “respublica” spoken of is “respublica Romana.” It is the Republic which wins back Italy, Africa, and Southern Spain from their Teutonic masters. It is the Republic which beats back from the ransomed lands the new attacks of the Frank and the Alaman. If Gregory the Great stoops to flatter