Excerpt from The Productive BeliefsAnd killed. For the first time Roman soldiers were defeated by Barbarian warriors within the bounds of the Empire. Men began to look at each other with strange eyes and to wonder what the future of the world would be. In the year 410 A. D. The world reeled as from a terrible blow. In that year Alaric and his West Goths sacked the city of Rome. The event staggered the imagination of men. It was as if the sun had suddenly begun to dance wildly about the sky. Rome the stable, Rome the dependable, Rome the eternal had bent before the onslaught of its foes. Life itself seemed beginning to fall apart. The very structure of civilization seemed about to disintegrate. With strange palpitations of the heart and with eyes full of fear and anxiety men whispered together about the bewildering days which had come upon them and the more bewildering days which lay ahead. In the midst of it all, while men's minds were dizzy and their hearts were faint, a man in North Africa caught a vision of the permanent in the midst of the ¿eeting, a vision of the stable and.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.