“Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the horologe of time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era.”[33] So writes Mr. Carlyle in one of his powerful essays; and he is correct. As gradually and as silently as childhood passes into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood again into old age, so does a nation and the world itself pass from one era into another. But if the signal of such a change is not heard sounding through the world, the moment of the transition is foreknown and has been preordained by God, under whose eye all agents throughout the universe are ever acting out their parts. Men are sometimes taken by surprise, but God never. Men are often mistaken in their calculations of the action of natural forces, but it cannot be so with God. A revolution brews like an angry storm, all in silence; and bursts; and a nation is shivered into fragments. Men are amazed; they have made a false reckoning; but the storm has brewed under the eye of God, and gathered its hidden forces, and burst at the very moment that God allowed it, and the havoc has been done up to the time which he has marked out. This is the expression of a great Catholic principle of history which it is well, especially in this age of godless theories, to keep constantly before our minds. We are about to endeavor to show how powerfully the truth of this great historical principle is brought out in that part of history to which our subject refers, for it is well said by Cesare Cantu in his _Storia Universale_,[34] “If ever history was manifested as a visible order of Providence, it was in these times.”
As we pass from the fourth into the fifth century, we come into a new era of the history of the church. The fourth age was one of mental strife; it was an age of great minds. The enemy of the church in the time of the persecutions had been brute force; now it was power of intellect. But God always has his champions ready. In the persecutions, they were the martyrs; in the fourth age, they were the Athanasiuses and the Ambroses. But in the fifth age the men of God’s choice are of another type. They are men out of the darkness, savages of the forest, wild dwellers amid the ice-mountains and the swamps. They have known no civilizing influences; they are nature’s children, and hardy as the rock and granite. They have reason, it is true; but it does not guide them on their strange, savage mission. They are all driven on by an instinct that is irresistible.