IV.] CHURCH HISTORY. 99 intelligible wreck of ancient magnificence, from which it fails apparently to draw even the ordinary lessons of civilisation ? what period and region of the whole history of the world conveys a less important lesson than Greece during the Middle Ages of European History ? It is scarcely less so with Italy, except for the fact that during a great part of those ages Italy was the centre and stage of Ecclesiastical History, in which, as I shall point out directly, and in which alone, on any large or broad scale, the unity and continuity are to be found. The vital interest of Medieval and Modern History lies in England, France and Germany, as certainly as that of the ancient lies in the East, in Greece and Italy; no small part of that of the future lies in the further Western world. The actors in the medieval and modern drama are the new nations, nations that were unheard of before the decline of the Roman empire began, and which inherited from the civilisation of that empire only the ecclesiastical culture, not the political system, or even the political map, which that system had laid out. The ideas of jnedieval and modern life are of medieval and modern growth, or if connected with antiquity, connected by a new birth of culture, a re-discovery, a re-creation, not a continuous impulse of vitality. Save in the one region, that of the History of Religion, Ecclesiastical History; yet in that also the one great fact of the Christian dispensation, which connects the ancient Hebrew isolation with the great Catholic Church life, is itself as much a break as a link of continuity ; so immensely does the new transcend the old, that, in the apostle's words, old things are passed •away and behold all things are become new. The Unity and Continuity of Ancient and Modern History is an idea which is realised on a great and intelligible scale in Ecclesiastical History only ; and even there the unity is to some extent a unity of ideas, a coincidence of religious and moral H 2