Explore "Europe and the Faith" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That state of society which I have just described, the ordered and united society of the Roman Empire, passed into another and very different state of society: the society of what are called "The Dark Ages."
From these again rose, after another 600 years of adventures and perils, the great harvest of medieval civilization. Hardly had the Roman Empire turned in its maturity to accept the fruit of its long development (I mean the Catholic Church), when it began to grow old and was clearly about to suffer some great transition. But that transition, which threatened to be death, proved in the issue not death at all, but a mixture of Vision and Change.