involving personal contribution, had substituted for responsibility and
privilege a burden so heavy that under it the civic life of the Empire
was crushed to extinction. In Italy, above all, the ancient seed was
running out. Under the influence of economic and social movement, the
old stock had died and disappeared, or changed beyond recognition. The
old language, except in the mouths and from the pens of the few, was
fast losing its identity. Uncertainty, indifference, stagnation,
weariness of body, mind, and soul, leaden resignation and despair,
forgetfulness of the glories of the past in art and even in heroism,
were the inheritance of the last generations of the old order. Jerome
felt barbarism closing in: _Romanus orbis ruit_, he says,--the Roman
world is tumbling in ruins.

In measure as the vitality of pagan Rome was sapped, into the inert and
decaying mass there penetrated gradually the two new life-currents of a
new religion and a new blood. The change they wrought from the first
century to the descent of the Northerners was not sudden, nor was it
rapid. Nor was it always a change that carried visible warrant of
virtue. The mingling of external races in the army and in trade, the
interference of a Northern soldiery in the affairs of the throne, the
more peaceful but more intimate shuffling of the population through the
social and economic emergence of the one-time nameless and poor, whether
of native origin or foreign, may have contributed fresh blood to an
anaemic society, but the result most apparent to the eye and most
disturbing to the soul was the debasement of standards and the fears
that naturally come with violent, sudden, or merely unfamiliar change.
The new religion may have contributed new hope and erected new
standards, but it also contributed exaggerations, contradictions, and
new uncertainties. The life of logic began to be displaced by the life
of feeling.