Beside the crumbling world of paganism there arose, in former times, as though outside society, another world, looking on at those great spectacles, poor, retiring, secluded, taking no part in the business of life except when its lessons or its succour were needed. It was a marvellous thing to see those early bishops, almost all honoured with the name of saints and martyrs, those simple priests watching over the relics and cemeteries; those monks and hermits in their convents or in their caves, laying down laws of peace, morals, charity, when all was war, corruption, barbarism; going between the tyrants of Rome and the leaders of the Tartars and Goths, to prevent the injustice of the former and the cruelty of the latter; stopping armies with a wooden cross and a peaceful word; the weakest of men, and protecting the world against Attila[436]; placed between two universes to be the link that joined them, to console the last moments of an expiring society and support the first steps of a society in its cradle. * [Sidenote: My own criticism.] It was impossible but that the truths unfolded in the _Génie du Christianisme_ should contribute to a change of ideas. Again, it is to this work that the present love for the buildings of the Middle Ages is due: it is I who have called upon the young century to admire the old temples. If my opinion has been misused; if it is not true that our cathedrals approach the Parthenon in beauty; if it is false that those churches teach us unknown facts in their documents of stone; if it is madness to maintain that those granite memories reveal to us things that escaped the learned Benedictines; if by dint of eternally repeating the word Gothic people grow wearied to death of it: that is not my fault. For the rest, with respect to the arts, I know the shortcomings of the _Génie du Christianisme_; that portion of my work is faulty, because, in 1800, I was not acquainted with the arts: I had not seen Italy, nor Greece, nor Egypt. Also, I did not make sufficient use of the lives of the saints and of the legends, although they offered me a number of marvellous instances: by selecting with taste, one could there reap a plentiful harvest. This field of the wealth of mediæval imagination surpasses the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid and the Milesian fables in fruitfulness. My work, moreover, contains some scanty or false judgments, such as that which I pronounce upon Dante, to whom I have since paid a brilliant tribute. In the serious respect, I have completed the _Génie du Christianisme_ in my _Études historiques_, one of my writings that has been least spoken of and most plundered.