It was far otherwise with the more poetical and therefore more practical religion of the West.
It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affection in the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King.
In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recovered its youth.

That is the meaning of the movement I have described as the awakening of the West and the resurrection of Rome.
And the whole point of that movement, as I propose to suggest, was that it was a popular movement.

It had returned with exactly that strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem.
Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down into that dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemed to end in the entrails of the earth.

The men who followed him passed on, as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark Ages; but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that world of death, and their journey ended in the land of the living.
They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of men have looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundreds of happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will, and saw St.Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds..