But with the waning power, glory, and wealth of Rome,—­decimated, pillaged, trodden under foot by Goths and Vandals, rebuked by Providence, deserted by emperors, abandoned to decay and ruin,—­some expedient or new claim to precedency was demanded to prevent the Roman bishops from sinking into mediocrity.  It was at this crisis that the pontificate of Leo began, in the year 440.  It was a gloomy period, not only for Rome, but for civilization.  The queen of cities had been repeatedly sacked, and her treasures destroyed or removed to distant cities.  Her proud citizens had been sold as slaves; her noble matrons had been violated; her grand palaces had been levelled with the ground; her august senators were fugitives and exiles.  All kinds of calamities overspread the earth and decimated the race,—­war, pestilence, and famine.  Men in despair hid themselves in caves and monasteries.  Literature and art were crushed; no great works of genius appeared.  The paralysis of despair deadened all the energies of civilized man.  Even armies lost their vigor, and citizens refused to enlist.  The old mechanism of the Caesars, which had kept the Empire together for three hundred years after all vitality had fled, was worn out.  The general demoralization had led to a general destruction.  Vice was succeeded by universal violence; and that, by universal ruin.  Old laws and restraints were no longer of any account.  A civilization based on material forces and Pagan arts had proved a failure.  The whole world appeared to be on the eve of dissolution.  To the thoughtful men of the age everything seemed to be involved in one terrific mass of desolation and horror.  “Even Jerome,” says a great historian, “heaped together the awful passages of the Old Testament on the capture of Jerusalem and other Eastern cities; and the noble lines of Virgil on the sack of Troy are but feeble descriptions of the night which covered the western Empire.”

Now Leo was the man for such a crisis, and seems to have been raised up to devise some new principle of conservation around which the stricken world might rally.  “He stood equally alone and superior,” says Milman, “in the Christian world.  All that survived of Rome—­of her unbounded ambition, of her inflexible will, and of her belief in her title to universal dominion—­seemed concentrated in him alone.”

Leo was born, in the latter part of the fourth century, at Rome, of noble parents, and was intensely Roman in all his aspirations.  He early gave indications of future greatness, and was consecrated to a service in which only talent was appreciated.  When he was nothing but an acolyte, whose duty it was to light the lamps and attend on the bishop, he was sent to Africa and honored with the confidence of the great Bishop of Hippo.  And he was only deacon when he was sent by the Emperor Valentinian III. to heal the division between Aetius and Albinus,—­rival generals, whose dissensions compromised the safety of the Empire.  He was absent on important missions when the death of Sixtus, A.D. 440, left the Papacy without a head.  On Leo were all eyes now fixed, and he was immediately summoned by the clergy and the people of Rome, in whom the right of election was vested, to take possession of the vacant throne.  He did not affect unworthiness like Gregory in later years, but accepted at once the immense responsibility.