on Laurentian ground,
  And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars;
  As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars
  With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
  From Romulus down to our Caesar—­last, best of that blood, of that thew.
  Now learn ye to love who loved never—­now ye who have loved, love
      anew!

’Last, best of that blood’—­her blood, fusa Paphies de cruore, and the blood of Teucer, revocato a sanguine Teucri, ’of that thew’—­the thew of Tros and of Mars.  Of these and no less than these our Roman believed himself the son and inheritor.

If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within our ten fingers the secret of the ‘Dark Ages,’ the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the point of stamping it out.  They hated it, not as literature; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous and they austere:  but they hated it because it held in its very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had to fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no issue save that one of the twain—­Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus or the carpenter’s son of Nazareth—­must go under.

It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between adversaries so tremendous.  To-day, in Dr Smith’s “Classical Dictionary,” Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by jowl with Terpsichore.  But we are not concerned, here, with what happened in the end.  We are concerned with what these forthright Christian fighters had in their minds—­to trample out the old literature because of the false religion.  Milton understood this, and was thinking of it when he wrote of the effect of Christ’s Nativity—­

     The Oracles are dumb;
     No voice or hideous hum
     Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. 
     Apollo from his shrine
     Can no more divine,
     With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
     No mighty trance, or breathed spell
     Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.

     The lonely mountains o’er,
     And the resounding shore,
     A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
     From haunted spring, and dale
     Edg’d with poplar pale,
     The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
     With flower-inwoven tresses torn
     The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his “Hymn to Proserpine,” supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the ‘old profession’ on the morrow of Constantine’s proclaiming the Christian faith—­