and corrupting stimulants!  Who, more than he and his immediate successors, taught loyalty to God as the universal Sovereign, and the virtues generated by a peaceful life,—­patriotism, self-denial, and faith?  He was a dictator only as Bernard was, ruling by the power of learning and sanctity.  As an original administrative genius he was scarcely surpassed by Gregory VII.  Above all, he sought to establish faith in the world.  Reason had failed.  The old civilization was a dismal mockery of the aspirations of man.  The schools of Athens could make Sophists, rhetoricians, dialecticians, and sceptics.  But the faith of the Fathers could bring philosophers to the foot of the Cross.  What were material conquests to these conquests of the soul, to this spiritual reign of the invisible principles of the kingdom of Christ?

So, as the vicegerents of Almighty power, the popes began to reign.  Ridicule not that potent domination.  What lessons of human experience, what great truths of government, what principles of love and wisdom are interwoven with it!  Its growth is more suggestive than the rise of any temporal empires.  It has produced more illustrious men than any European monarchy.  And it aimed to accomplish far grander ends,—­even obedience to the eternal laws which God has decreed for the public and private lives of men.  It is invested with more poetic interest.  Its doctors, its dignitaries, its saints, its heroes, its missions, and its laws rise up before us in sublime grandeur when seriously contemplated.  It failed at last, when no longer needed.  But it was not until its encroachments and corruptions shocked the reason of the world, and showed a painful contrast to those virtues which originally sustained it, that earnest men arose in indignation, and declared that this perverted institution should no longer be supported by the contributions of more enlightened ages; that it had become a tyrannical and dangerous government, to be assailed and broken up.  It has not yet passed away.  It has survived the Reformation and the attacks of its countless enemies.  How long this power of blended good and evil will remain we cannot predict.  But one thing we do know,—­that the time will come when all governments shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; and Christian truth alone shall so permeate all human institutions that the forces of evil shall be driven forever into the immensity of eternal night.

With the Pontificate of Leo the Great that dark period which we call the “Middle Ages” may be said to begin.  The disintegration of society then was complete, and the reign of ignorance and superstition had set in.  With the collapse of the old civilization a new power had become a necessity.  If anything marked the Middle Ages it was the reign of priests and nobles.  This reign it will be my object to present in the Lectures which are to fill the next volume of this Work, together with subjects closely connected with papal domination and feudal life.