ever-losing

Updated: May 25, 2025

Those far-off centuries became veritably alive to me the Arian kings fighting an ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the Catholic Church, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of the Roman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through winter snow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture in remote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holy things, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on the precious remnants and broken traditions of the older classical world; the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics, nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all, as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and the menace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half a mosque and half a Christian cathedral.

Mrs. Humphry Ward - A Writer's Recollections — Volume 1