Principles of western civilisation

236 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

suggests rather than represents, that the scientific imagination continues to be concentrated. There is no more profoundly dramatic spectacle in history than that of the Teutonic peoples of the ninth century being slowly involved in the sweep of the movement which has now begun to fill the Western world ; of Charlemagne endeavouring through the capitularies* to govern, in the terms of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Det,’ a world still removed but a little from the background of universal paganism ; of an emperor attempting to regulate through the Missi Dominici vast populations to whom the new movement is scarcely more than a name, begging them “for their souls’ sake” to pay the just penalties of their patricides, their fratricides, and their murders, ‘“‘by which many Christian people perish.”* We see the Pope who has crowned him living in a world in which the forms, the institutions, the very ideals and the thoughts, are all as yet cast in a mould scarcely more than pagan. Yet we see each standing, not simply on the threshold of another order of civilisation, but in the vestibule of a new epoch of human evolution, dreaming, pope and emperor alike, each he knows not what—dreaming of the accomplishment in a lifetime, in a thousand years, in a thousand decades, of a transformation immeasurably greater in reach than that which has already occupied untold aeons of human development.

In this world, still pagan in all its outward

1 Cf. Capitulary of Charlemagne, issued in 802, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, by E. F. Henderson, ii. ii.

2 St. Augustine’s De Cruztate Det was the favourite reading of Charlemagne. . § Capitulary of Charlemagne, Henderson’s Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages.