in its very cradle; and with Christianity all chance--be sure of it--
of their own progress. Roman law, order, and discipline, the very
things which they needed to acquire by a contact of five hundred
years, would have been swept away. All classic literature and
classic art, which they learnt to admire with an almost superstitious
awe, would have perished likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of
physical science, and all that we owe to the ancients, would have
perished; and we should have truly had an invasion of the barbarians,
followed by truly dark ages, in which Europe would have had to begin
all anew, without the help of the generations which had gone before.

Therefore it was well as it was, and God was just and merciful to
them and to the human race. They had a glorious destiny, and
glorious powers wherewith to fulfil it: but they had, as every man
and people has, before whom there is a noble future, to be educated
by suffering. There was before them a terrible experience of sorrow
and disappointment, sin and blood, by which they gained the first
consciousness of what they could do and what they could not. Like
Adam of old, like every man unto this day, they ate of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, and were driven out of the paradise
of unconsciousness; had to begin again sadder and wiser men, and eat
their bread in the sweat of their brow; and so to rise, after their
fall, into a nobler, wiser, more artificial, and therefore more truly
human and divine life, than that from which they had at first fallen,
when they left their German wilds.

One does not, of course, mean the parallel to fit in all details.
The fall of the Teuton from the noble simplicity in which Tacitus
beheld and honoured him, was a work of four centuries; perhaps it was
going on in Tacitus' own time. But the culminating point was the