the nations of the East. The Christian communities, founded at the cost of immense sacrifices, by monks of the orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic, though flourishing in the commencement, never became deeply rooted enough in this ungrateful soil to withstand the tempest of persecution.
The people, before whose eyes the light of the Gospel had shone for a moment in all its brilliancy, soon relapsed into darkness, and wandered far from the path which leads to God, that is, to truth and life. It must be acknowledged, however, that the constant efforts of the Church to convert and civilise the Pagan nations produced results which have been perhaps too little noticed. The labours of the missionaries contributed greatly to the prodigious development of European civilisation, and they left in the extreme East curious recollections of the Catholic preaching.
The nations of Northern Asia had remained for many centuries completely unknown to the West. The Roman world did not even suspect that, far in the remotest parts of the mysterious East, there existed an immense empire, with great and wealthy cities, filled with numberless inhabitants, far advanced in the arts, industry, agriculture, and commerce. Thus, two systems of civilisation had established themselves at the two extremities of the ancient continent, and for centuries, their growth and development had gone on, without any communication or mutual influence, each working and depending on its own resources. But suddenly we find wars of unheard of magnitude bringing these two great powers into contact. The prodigious expansion of the Tartar races inundated the West at the same time that
