Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience.

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons into servitude.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

When did one man ever civilize a people?

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.