For rightly understood those centuries gave us not only our culture, our civilisation, and our Faith, but ensured them to us that they should always endure.  They established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer annihilation or barrenness.  They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay.  They, and they alone, established us in the secure possession of our own souls so that we alone in the world might develop from within, to change but never to die, and to be—­yes, alone in the world—­Christians.

The almost incredible strength and well being of those years must be seized also.  There was not a town in Italy and the West that did not expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period.  It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals made, the great roads planned and constructed, and our communications established for ever.  There was no industry that did not grow marvellously in strength, there is not a class that did not increase in wealth and well-being beyond our dreams of progress.  There is scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives that was not then created that it might endure.  It was then our religion, the soul of Europe, was born.

Christianity, the Faith, which, little by little, absorbed the empire, till it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe, is thought to have been brought first to Ravenna by S. Apollinaris, a disciple as we are told of S. Peter, who made him her first bishop.  So at least his acts assert; and though little credence may, I fear, be placed in them, that he was the first bishop of Ravenna, and in the time of S. Peter, is not at variance with what we know of that age, is attested by the traditions of the city, and is supported by later authorities.  S. Peter Chrysologus (c. 440), the most famous of his successors, for instance, assures us of it.  This great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is nothing strange, but he asserts that though he often spilt his blood for the Faith, yet God preserved him a long time, not less than twenty years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his life.[1]

[Footnote 1:  His relics lay for many years in the church dedicated in his honour at Classis; but in 549 they were removed from their great tomb and placed in a more secret spot in the same church.  Cf.  Agnellus. Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis (Ed. Holder—­Egger in Monumenta Germanicae Historica) and S. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 128 in Migne.]