THE PROBLEM FACED BY THE MIDDLE AGES. That the lamp of learning burned low during this period of assimilation is no cause for wonder. Recovery from such a deluge of barbarism on a weakened society is not easy. In fact the recovery was a long and slow process, occupying nearly the whole of a thousand years. The problem which faced the Church, as the sole surviving force capable of exerting any constructive influence, was that of changing the barbarism and anarchy of the sixth century, with its low standards of living and lack of humane ideals, into the intelligent, progressive civilization of the fifteenth century. This was the work of the Middle Ages, and largely the work of the Christian Church. It was not a period of progress, but one of assimilation, so that a common western civilization might in time be developed out of the diverse and hostile elements mixed together by the rude force of circumstances. The enfeebled Roman race was to be reinvigorated by mixture with the youthful and vigorous Germans (R. 50); to the institutions of ancient society were to be added certain social and political institutions of the Germanic peoples; all were to be brought under the rule of a common Christian Church; and finally, when these people had become sufficiently civilized and educated to enable them to understand and appreciate, "nearly every achievement of the Greeks and the Romans in thought, science, law, and the practical arts" was to be recovered and made a part of our western civilization.
In this chapter we have dealt largely with the great fundamental movements which have so deeply influenced the course of human history. In the chapters which immediately follow we shall tell how learning was preserved during the period and what facilities for education actually existed; trace the more important efforts made to reëstablish schools and learning; and finally describe the culmination of the process of absorbing and educating the Germans in the civilization they had conquered that came in the great period of recovery of the ancient learning and civilization--the age of the Renaissance.
1. Do the peculiar problems of assimilation of the foreign-born, revealed to us by the World War, put us in a somewhat similar position to Rome under the Empire as relates to the need of a guiding national faith?