Charlemagne, the man typical of Teutonic force and power, a consummator of ancient forces and an initiator of a new progress, stands between the German and the Roman worlds as a gigantic form on the boundary line of two nations and two civilizations. Charlemagne was the first to realize the political unity of western Christendom as spiritually personified in the Papacy. This is the significance of that mighty event, pregnant with tremendous possibilities for good and for evil, when on the Christmas day of A. D. 800, the Pope bestowed upon Charlemagne the political crown of the Christian world with the obligation to support the church in its spiritual and secular supremacy. Only by the imperial crown, as a continuation of the majesty of the Roman Cæsars, could Germany maintain even its ascendancy among the other nations of Europe. When the German races were organized as a nation and imbued with the Christian faith by Charlemagne, this new political formation became the bearer of a new civilization amalgamated from its various constituents and as complex as was the state itself. Though preeminently papal and clerical, yet it was, also, eminently intellectual and classical. The treasures of a new thought, of culture, of Greco-Roman refinement, and even of material wealth, were opened to the people of Germany. Fruitful as these Roman germs were, they were only a ferment for German strength and characteristics; for the Germans alone made Christianity a living issue. It was impossible for the putrid soil of the decaying Roman Empire to become a fruitful abode for Christianity. Men and women fled to the desert to worship God in solitary contemplation and far from the temptation of the world. The monks in spite of the faults and the degeneration which will ever cling to things human are, after all, the purveyors of intellectual and moral culture. The cloisters, too, were at first fortresses of civilization, labor, agriculture, artisanship, and, though with monachal limitations, they were yet transmitters of literary and classical antiquity. We need only recall the life of the disciples of Saint Benedict in the cloister of Saint Gall, so dramatically described by Scheffel in his _Ekkehard_, their activity in letters and missionary work and gardening, in the copying of the classics and in teaching, as _Ekkehard_ taught the Duchess Hadwig the intellectual charms of the great pagan poet Virgil, to realize the debt owed by civilization to these monks. Though they and their classics, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, etc., sunk into the foundations of our civilization, yet, in their fanatic zeal, they destroyed many priceless old German treasures, relics of antiquity, which are, unfortunately, irretrievably lost. Charlemagne, with his deep intuition, recognized the value of these relics, and, assisted by the staff of free-hearted and free-minded scholars with whom he had surrounded himself, tried to save what could yet be saved.