NO REMEDY, AND FINAL RUIN.

519

It was impossible that it should be otherwise. We have seen to what a fearful depth of degradation Pagan Rome had gone in the days of the Cæsars, yet the empire did not perish then. There was hope for the people. The gospel of Jesus Christ carried in earnestness, in simplicity, and in its heavenly power, brought multitudes to its saving light, and to a knowledge of the purity of Jesus Christ. This was their salvation; and the gospel of Christ, by restoring the virtue and integrity of the individual, was the preservation of the Roman State.

But when by apostasy that gospel had lost its purity and its power in the multitudes who professed it; and when it was used only as a cloak to cover the same old pagan wickedness; when this form of godliness, practiced not only without the power but in defiance of it, permeated the great masses of the people, and the empire had thereby become a festering mass of corruption; when the only means which it was possible for the Lord himself to employ to purify the people, had been taken and made only the cloak under which to increase unto more ungodliness, there was no other remedy destruction must come.

And it did come, as we have seen, by a host wild and savage, it is true; but whose social habits were so far above those of the people which they destroyed, that savage as they were, they were caused fairly to blush at the shameful corruptions which they found in this so-called Christian society of Rome. This is proved by the best authority. A writer who lived at the time of the barbarian invasions and who wrote as a Christian, gives the following evidence as to 'the condition of things:

866

The church which ought everywhere to propitiate God, what does she, but provoke him to anger? How many may one meet, even in the church, who are not still drunkards, or debauchees, or adulterers, or fornicators, or robbers, or murderers, or the like, or all these at once, without end? It is even a sort of holiness among Christian people, to be less vicious.' From the public worship of God, and almost during it,

they pass to deeds of shame. Scarce a rich man but would commit murder and fornication. We have lost the whole power of Christianity, and offend God the more, that we sin as Christians. We are worse than the barbarians and heathen. If the Saxon is wild, the Frank faithless, the Goth inhuman, the Alanian drunken, the Hun licentious, they are, by reason of their ignorance, far less punishable than we, who, knowing the commandments of God, commit all these crimes."- Salvian.33

"He compares the Christians, especially of Rome, with the Arian Goths and Vandals, to the disparagement of the Romans, who add to the gross sins of nature the refined vices of civilization, passion for the theaters, debauchery, and unnatural lewdness. Therefore has the just God given them into the hands of the barbarians, and exposed them to the ravages of the migrating hordes."- Schaff

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And this description, says the same author, "is in general not untrue." And he confirms it in his own words by the excellent observation that "nothing but the divine judgment of destruction upon this nominally Christian, but essentially heathen, world, could open the way for the moral regeneration of society. There must be new, fresh nations, if the Christian civilization, prepared in the old Roman empire, was to take firm root and bear ripe fruit."— Schaff:

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These new, fresh nations came, and planted themselves upon the ruins of the old. Out of these came the faithful Christians of the Dark Ages, and upon them broke the light of the Reformation. And out of these and by this means God produced the civilization of the nineteenth century and the new republic of the United States of America, from which there should go once more in its purity, as in the beginning, the everlasting gospel to every nation and kindred and tongue and people.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE SUPREMACY OF THE PAPACY.

S out of the political difficulties of the days of Constantine, the Catholic Church rose to power in the State; so out of the ruin of the Roman empire she rose to supremacy over kings and nations. She had speedily wrought the ruin of one empire, and now for more than a thousand years she would prove a living curse to all the States and empires that should succeed it.

We have seen how that, by the arrogant ministry of Leo, the bishop of Rome was made the fountain of faith, and was elevated to a position of dignity and authority that the aspiring prelacy had never before attained. For Leo, as the typical pope, was one whose "ambition knew no bounds; and to gratify it, he stuck at nothing; made no distinction between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood; as if he had adopted the famous maxim of Julius Cæsar,

Be just, unless a kingdom tempts to break the laws,
For sovereign power alone can justify the cause,'

or thought the most criminal actions ceased to be criminal,
and became meritorious, when any ways subservient to the
increase of his power or the exaltation of his see."-Bower.1
Nor was the force of any single point of his example ever
lost upon
his successors. His immediate successor,-

HILARY, 461-467,

was so glad to occupy the place which had been made so large by Leo, that shortly after his election he wrote a letter 1"History of the Popes," Leo, last par. but one.

to the other bishops asking them to exult with him, taking particular care in the letter to tell them that he did not doubt that they all knew what respect and deference was paid "in the Spirit of God to St. Peter and his see." The bishops of Spain addressed him as "the successor of St. Peter, whose primacy ought to be loved and feared by all." He was succeeded by

SIMPLICIUS, 467-483,

in whose pontificate the empire perished when the Heruli, under Odoacer, overran all Italy, deposed the last emperor of the West, appropriated to themselves one third of all the lands, and established the Herulian kingdom, with Odoacer as king of Italy. In fact, the more the imperial power faded, and the nearer the empire approached its fall, the more rapidly and the stronger grew the papal assumptions. Thus the very calamities which rapidly wrought the ruin of the empire, and which were hastened by the union of Church and State, were turned to the advantage of the bishopric of Rome. During the whole period of barbarian invasions from 400 to 476, the Catholic hierarchy everywhere adapted itself to the situation, and reaped power and influence from the calamities that were visited everywhere.

We have seen that Innocent I, upon whose mind there appears first to have dawned the vast conception of Rome's universal ecclesiastical supremacy, during the invasion of Italy and the siege of Rome by Alaric, headed an embassy to the emperer to mediate for a treaty of peace between the empire and the invading Goths. We have seen that at the moment of Leo's election to the papal see, he was absent on a like mission to reconcile the enmity of the two principal Roman officers, which was threatening the safety of the empire. Yet other and far more important occasions of the same kind fell to the lot of Leo during the term of his bishopric. In 453 Leo was made the head of an embassy to meet Attila as he was on his way to Rome, if possible to

THE PAPACY AND THE BARBARIANS.

523

turn him back. The embassy was successful; a treaty was formed; Attila retired beyond the Danube, where he immediately died; and Italy was delivered. This redounded no less to the glory of Leo than any of the other remarkable things which he had accomplished. He was not so successful with Genseric two years afterward, yet even then he succeeded in mitigating the ravages of the Vandals, which were usually so dreadful that the idea still lives in the word "vandalism."

Moreover, it was not against religion as such that the barbarians made war, as they themselves were religious. It was against that mighty empire of which they had seen much, and suffered much, and heard more, that they warred. It was as nations taking vengeance upon a nation which had been so great, and which had so proudly asserted lordship over all other nations, that they invaded the Roman empire. And when they could plant themselves and remain, as absolute lords, in the dominions of those who had boasted of absolute and eternal dominion, and thus humble the pride of the mighty Rome, this was their supreme gratification. As these invasions were not inflicted everywhere at once, but at intervals through a period of seventy-five years, the church had ample time to adapt herself to the ways of such of the barbarians as were heathen, which as ever she readily did. The heathen barbarians were accustomed to pay the greatest respect to their own priesthood, and were willing to admit the Catholic priesthood to an equal or even a larger place in their estimation. Such of them as were already professedly Christian, were Arians, and not so savage as the Catholics; therefore, they, with the exception of the Vandals, were not so ready to persecute, and were willing to settle and make themselves homes in the territories of the vanished empire.

An account of the conversion of the Burgundians, and through them of the Franks, will illustrate the dealings of the papacy with the barbarians, and will also give the key