To the Eve of the Reformation Volume 2 of 3: 313-1274 yes Msgr Philip Hughes Eternal Word Television Network

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THE DONATIST SCHISM, 311-393 Let us begin by making clear what we mean by " The West." It is the western half of the Roman Empire as Gratian reorganised it in 379, the Pretorian Prefectures of Italy and the Gauls, the dioceses of Italy, Rome, Africa, Gaul, Spain and Britain, all Europe west of the Rhine, south of the Danube and west, roughly, of the meridian of 20 deg. E. with, in Africa, the modern Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli. The West had not been created a separate empire by Diocletian's far-reaching reforms in the administration. It was, in his time, simply the sphere of jurisdiction of the junior of the two partners who, henceforward, were jointly to share the indivisible imperium?. This new system was only more or less preserved in the next hundred years. For thirteen years (324-337), under Constantine the Great, the Empire had but a single emperor; and after a short interval it was again united under his son Constantius II (351- 361). Valentinian I divided it once again in 364, and so it remained until the assassination of Valentinian II nearly thirty years later. This emperor left no heir, and his eastern colleague, mastering the usurper who had murdered Valentinian, now became sole emperor of the Roman world. This was Theodosius, called the Great, destined, though he could not know it, to be the last man to rule effectively the vast heritage in which, since the days of Augustus, the lands that encircle the Mediterranean had been politically and culturally united. Theodosius died (January 28, 395) prematurely, only a few months after his final establishment, and within ten years the forces, to ward off which the best efforts of every great mind in the last hundred years had been directed, surged up yet once again, this time to have their will. They were destined these forces which, carelessly and none too accurately, we have come to lump together as the Barbarian Invasions so to transform the West that, in the end, it became a new thing, politically and culturally. In that long process political unity disappeared and the Western Emperor, too, who was its symbol and its source. The Catholic Church survived. To understand what this meant we need to recall how much of Catholicism there was to survive; we must survey the Catholic achievement in the West at the moment when the Barbarian Invasions began, describe the history of the Church in the West between the act of Constantine which definitely gave it legal security and the death of the last great personality whom that new age of the Christian Empire produced, St. Augustine. It is the story of Catholicism in Africa, perhaps the most Catholic province of the West, slowly shaken to pieces by the terrible experiences of the long Donatist schism; the story of Spain similarly disturbed but in less degree by the friends and the enemies of Priscillian; the story of the first attempts to evangelise what was the least Catholic part of all the countrysides of Gaul and of the Roman See's careful organisation of new means through which to develop the exercise of its traditional primacy. It is the story, too, of a great dogmatic conflict about the fundamentally important truth of the nature of the divine activity in the soul's progress towards God. It is the story, finally, of the life work of St. Augustine, the greatest mind as yet given to the Church. The Donatist Schism, which, in the fourth century, wrought as much damage to the Church in Africa as did the contemporary Arian trouble to the Church in the East, was a legacy from the persecution of Diocletian. Africa, on that emperor's partition of the State, fell within the jurisdiction of Maximian and although with Maximian's abdication (305) the persecution practically ceased, it had been, for the two years it lasted, a very bitter reality indeed. The Church had suffered particularly from a very stringent inquisition after the sacred books and vessels; and a very great proportion of the numerous nominal apostasies which occurred, had taken the form of surrendering the sacred books and vessels for profanation and destruction. Against such traditores, now more or less repentant, there was the same indignant feeling that had shown itself fifty years before in the time of St. Cyprian against the semi-apostates of the persecution of Decius. In Egypt, too, and in Rome, the Church was experiencing a similar period of strain. And, in Africa, as elsewhere, amongst those accused, or suspected, of thus throwing the holy things to the Pagans were a number of the bishops. One such episcopal suspect was the Bishop of Carthage, the Primate of Africa himself, Mensurius. Whatever the degree of his apostasy, Mensurius had had to face from a number of those whose loyalty won them imprisonment the confessors the same kind of trouble that had marked the beginning of St. Cyprian's episcopate. History was repeating itself; the confessors, once again, were endeavouring to subordinate episcopal authority to their own personal prestige. The bishop had to take disciplinary action. He made careful distinction between the real victims of the persecution and those who, in danger of the law for other, less avowable, reasons, now used their faith to win alms and help from the charity of the faithful, or who were in prison as the inevitable result of their own acts of bravado. Whereupon the self-created and self-glorified " confessors" declared him cut off from communion with them and therefore from the Church. Mensurius died in 311. In his place the Church elected the deacon Cecilian who had been his chief ally in the recent troubles, and to whom there had fallen the unpleasant task of carrying out the details of the late bishop's policy in respect of the rebellious " confessors." Immediately all the latent hatreds fused. There were the " confessors," now long freed from prison, and their cliques; there were Cecilian's rivals, embittered since his election; there were his predecessor's trustees whom Cecilian had, at the eleventh hour, just been able to foil in a scheme of embezzlement; there was a pious and wealthy woman Lucilla mortally offended by Cecilian's refusal to enthuse over her private cult of her own privately canonised " confessor"; there were the bishops of Numidia, already embittered with Mensurius and very willing to embarrass his successor. Finally, there was Donatus, Bishop of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, but living now in Carthage, a born leader of men with a genius for organisation and propaganda. He it was who organised the party, and from him it has its name. The discontented appealed, then, against Cecilian's election; and the Primate of Numidia, whom it in no way concerned, came into Carthage with seventy bishops to try the case. Cecilian ignored the " council's " summons; he was declared to be an intruder. As " successor " to Mensurius the assembled bishops, and their motley of cranks and fanatics, elected one of Lucilla's clerics, half- chaplain, half-secretary, the lector Maiorinus. But the most serious feature of the affair was not the mere fact that a second Bishop of Carthage had been intruded, but the theological basis by which the intrusion was justified and Cecilian condemned. Cecilian's consecrator had been the Bishop of Aptonga, Felix; and Felix of Aptonga, it was alleged, had in the recent persecution been among the traditores. Such apostasy, declared the electors of Maiorinus, a fall from grace, entailed necessarily the loss of all spiritual power in the apostate. Felix could no longer be a means of grace: he could no longer baptise, no longer ordain, nor consecrate. It was the old theory of St. Cyprian which Rome had condemned so vigorously, which he had died without retracting, and which had survived him as a peculiar tradition of the African Church, to be used now against his own legitimately elected successor. Cecilian was, then, no bishop, according to this theory; the priests he ordained were no priests; the sacrifices they offered a mere parade, their baptisms a ceremony only. Whoever depended on Cecilian ceased by the fact, necessarily inevitably, to be in the Church at all. Whence from the very beginning of the schism a terrible aggressive bitterness on the part of the schismatics; and within a very short time the quarrel within the Church had become a problem of public order. The civil authority could not but intervene. Cecilian was elected in 311, Maiorinus in 312 in the October of which year, Africa, by the battle of the Milvian Bridge, came under the control of Constantine. It was the very moment of the emperor's conversion, and to arrange the religious troubles of the province was one of his first concerns. He decided in favour of Cecilian, and the letter to the imperial Vicar of Africa, notifying this decision, is interesting witness to the emperor's high conception of his new role as the Church's protector. " I must admit," he wrote, " that I do not feel free to tolerate or to ignore these scandals, which may provoke the Divinity not only against the human race but against myself. For it is an act of the divine good pleasure which has chosen me to rule the world. Should I provoke Him, He may choose another. True and lasting peace I can never achieve, nor can I indeed ever promise myself the perfect happiness which comes from the good will of God Almighty, until all men, united in brotherly love, offer to the most holy God the worship of the Catholic faith." Constantine, thirty years of age, had marched from victory to victory ever since, on his father's death, he had forced himself on the other emperors as his successor. He was now, thanks to the unfamiliar nature of the problem, to meet a decisive check. His dual role of head of the State and protector of the Faith, his double anxiety for public order and the unity of the Church, were to be his undoing. He began (313) by recognising Cecilian and ordering the local authorities to effectuate the dispossession of the Donatists where these were in power. The Donatists appealed against the decision, alleging the invalidity of Cecilian's ordination and asking for judges from among the bishops of Gaul; and Constantine agreed that the question should be reopened. He chose three Gallic bishops, ordered others, Italians, to be added to them and with the pope at the head of the tribunal the affair was solemnly judged at Rome (October, 313). This episcopal court, sitting in the Lateran (the first appearance in ecclesiastical history of that famous palace), heard both sides and declared that Donatus had not proved his case. Cecilian was, undoubtedly, the lawfully elected Bishop of Carthage. The Donatists appealed once more. The affair was spreading rapidly, and already, in most of the African sees, the Catholic bishop had a Donatist competitor. Constantine ordered a new enquiry. Its subject this time was not Cecilian but his consecrator, the alleged traditor Felix of Aptonga, and the enquiry was an affair of State, conducted by the imperial officials in the courts. The police books of the time of the persecution were produced; the magistrate who had ordered the search and the arrest of Felix appeared to give evidence. It was proved that Felix was innocent, that he had in fact never even been arrested during the persecution, and also it transpired that the Donatists had been busy forging an official certificate of Felix's guilt. This evidence the emperor sent to Gaul where, at Aries, a great council from all the West had been convoked to adjudicate on the matter once more. The council (August, 314) examined the whole affair and, noting the Donatists as " crazy fanatics, a danger to Christianity," it declared for Cecilian. The Donatists appealed yet again, and for a third time Constantine listened to them. He summoned both Cecilian and Donatus to Brescia, and while he kept them there, sent to Carthage a commission to see if, with both of the leaders away, the rival factions could not be reconciled. Only when this was found impossible and the commission had reported that a decision must be given, did he judge. And once more, after another examination, he decided for Cecilian (November, 316). This decision Constantine followed up by an order that the churches which the Donatists held were to be restored to the Catholics, and that the Donatists were to be forbidden to meet. Constantine's unwillingness to enforce the judgements of the different judges to whom he had referred the matter and his readiness, time and again, to reopen it, are to be put down to. his anxiety for the preservation of public order. He knew his Africa, and knew that this was no mere question of a theologians' quarrel. It was, then, with the greatest reluctance that he issued the orders which were the logical consequence of the judgement, and the reception which met them must have seemed to justify his hesitation. Everywhere there were riots, destruction and bloodshed; and nowhere more of it all than in Numidia where, in the five years of the agitation, the Donatists had gained the upper hand and had driven the Catholics under. The movement, like Monophysitism a century later in Egypt, was beginning to draw to itself all that survived of the native tradition below the veneer of Roman civilisation, all that life so long exploited for the benefit of the cosmopolitan capitalist and adventurer, ancient social hatreds which would find in this religious crusade a long awaited opportunity, and which would turn it very soon into a peasants' war of rapine and murder. Wherever the Donatists gained ground, indeed, there soon appeared, as the militant auxiliaries of their bishop, the organised bands of the Circumcellions. It is not easy to find, in later history, a parallel which would serve to explain them. They were nominally Christian, fanatically attached to their own interpretation of the Gospel's social teaching, self-appointed judges and avengers of social inequality, rigorist in matters of morality in the narrow sense, and wholly unconcerned with its obligations where these stood in the way of their customary procedure. Armed with bludgeons they roamed the countrysides, ravaging the estates of the wealthy, compelling assent by outrage and terror, with forever on their lips the incongruous war cry of Deo Laudes. Their dearest aspiration was to die for the Faith, and if, since there were no longer any persecutors, this was now a matter of some difficulty, then to die at any rate and to seek death at the hands of the chance passer- by. So the tragicomic spectacle, at times, of the peaceful citizen bidden to murder the fanatic under the menace of the like fate for himself. Donatism did not invent the Circumcellions. Their extravagance was a local product of the spirituality of the century, akin to the extravagances of the undisciplined pioneers of monasticism in the deserts further to the East. But Donatism, with its insistence that the Catholics were laxists, the descendants of traditores, and with its profession of a higher and more rigorous sanctity, rallied these bands to the schism. As long as the schism lasted they were the picked agents of its propaganda, terrorists who came to hold whole provinces in their grip. Wherever they gained the upper hand the Catholics who held firm were massacred, those who yielded, re-baptised, and, if clerics, re-ordained. The churches which escaped destruction were washed and re-washed to purify them from the effects of the rites of the traditores, the Blessed Sacrament consecrated by Catholics thrown to the dogs. In the days of the Donatist power whole provinces laboured under this tyranny. Under these circumstances the policy of repression speedily developed into a local civil war, which another war of propaganda kept active and alive for years; and at last when, in 321, the Donatists made an appeal for toleration, Constantine granted it. He did so in letters which make no secret of his disgust and contempt for the sect. They are not to enjoy the privileges which the Catholics have; nevertheless they may live, and live as Donatists; the Catholics he exhorts to remember the Gospel and the duty of pardoning, and even of loving, those who hate them; the Donatist bishops were freed from prison: and the movement proceeded to consolidate what it had gained. The regime of tolerance inaugurated by Constantine lasted for just over twenty-five years until his son, Cons tans, in 347, felt himself strong enough to pick up the long-standing challenge. For that quarter of a century had been for the Donatists-especially in Numidia a period of licence, in which their violence had had full play. Now at last the Government proposed to come to the aid of the oppressed Catholics. It needed an army to execute the edict. Once more there were riots and massacres, but finally the Donatist bishops were rounded up and exiled, their churches handed over to the Catholics, and for fifteen uneasy years there was peace. That peace endured until Julian the Apostate, in the acknowledged hope of embarrassing Catholicism, recalled the exiles. Their return was the signal for a renewed reign of terror, and although Julian died the next year (363), his successor, Valentinian I, did not reverse this part of his policy. Valentinian was indeed a Catholic, but his religious belief was most carefully kept out of his public policy. Religious disputes, he held, were the bishops' affair, and he declined to take official notice of them. With his accession there set in for the African Church the worst period of its history so far. From the State it no longer received the protection of a privileged party. Donatist and Catholic were alike in the State's regard. The Church was dependent entirely on its own resources and unhappily these, at the moment, were not great. Notably it suffered from a lack of leaders, and from a hierarchy in which the proportion of nullities was unduly high. Restitutus, the Catholic primate, had even played a prominent part in that Council of Rimini which a few years earlier (359) had capitulated to the Arian Constantius II, while the Donatist primate Parmenian was a man of real ability, an organiser, a scholar and a good controversialist. His one competent Catholic opponent was the Bishop of Milevis, Optatus. But despite the logic of Optatus, and despite the jealousy that tore the Donatists into rival factions, and despite the differences which led to the expulsion of their greatest writer Tyconius, the schism maintained its gains. In 372 there was a great native rising against the Roman power. Many of the Donatists were implicated, and henceforward the government of Valentinian was a little less neutral; but for all that, and especially in Numidia, the Donatist supremacy was far from destroyed. Then, as the century came to an end, three things happened which promised to reverse the history of the thirty years since Julian. In 390 Parmenian died, after ruling his church for thirty-five years, and the Donatists were never again able to produce a leader of his ability. Two years later, by the death of Valentinian II, Africa came under the rule of Theodosius the Great, a convinced and enthusiastic Catholic, a stern Spaniard for whom compromise and half measures had no meaning. But more important, by far, than either of these events was the entry into Catholic life of St. Augustine, ordained priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo from 396.

ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE DONATIST SCHISM St. Augustine's first official connection with Donatism was his attendance at the Council of Carthage in 393. He was then a man close on forty; he had been a priest two years, and a Catholic for six. He was, like many another in this century of religious transition, the child of a mixed marriage in which the mother was Catholic and the father Pagan. From that mother he had gained, in earliest infancy and childhood, his first notions of Catholicism, a knowledge and love of God and of Jesus Christ which remained, despite the Pagan education of boyhood and adolescence, to be the source of never-ceasing self-questioning and discontented criticism of whatever system of thought attracted his mind. He was intellectually precocious, with the temperament of the artist, and all the frank sensuality of the Pagan. From his very schooldays, in the matter of sexual morality he ran amok, to settle down at the age of eighteen to something like sobriety with the girl who bore him the child Adeodatus. Meanwhile, amidst all his dissipated recreations and the financial anxieties that accompanied them, the thought of God and the attraction of Christ never left him, and with this, an ever- growing anxiety for intellectual security about God's nature and about the nature and origin of evil. The Church's doctrine on these problems, like many another since, he partly misunderstood and wholly disliked. Catholics, he thought, had an anthropomorphic idea of God (whence their retention of the Old Testament); and a doctrine which made man's free will responsible for evil, not only conflicted with his philosophical creed (which made evil to be a thing material), but conflicted also with his desire to possess Christ and yet follow his own way of life. Cicero's Hortensius set once more aflame his old desire for wisdom though he grieved that the wonder book lacked the savour of Christ; and then, at nineteen, he gave himself to the Manichees. St. Augustine's adherence to Manicheeism is one of the earliest, and perhaps the most noteworthy, of all the contacts between Catholicism and a religion that harassed it for a good thousand years. Mani, its founder, was a Persian, and it was about the year 240 that he began to publish his supplement to the world's revealed religion. Mani, it is his own account of himself, is the herald of a doctrine in which all revelation is summed up and completed, the successor of Buddha, Zoroaster and Our Lord Himself. The Paraclete promised by Our Lord has appeared, revealing all truth to Mani, past and future equally with the present, and Mani is now one body and one soul with the Paraclete. But there is nothing of the Montanist ecstatic about this Persian prophet. Clear, cool-headed reflection marks all his writings. The chief influences upon his thought are eastern. There is in it nothing directly Hellenistic. The prophet never himself crossed the frontiers of the Roman Empire. His religion is not a product of Paganism, but a kind of bastard Christianity, the outcome of Mani's ambition to complete Christianity, and of the accident that his own life coincided with the flood tide of the syncretist movement observable in the religious world since the death of Alexander the Great. It is this Syncretism that is responsible for the curious juxtaposition of Christian and anti-Christian elements in the work. It is responsible, too, for the presence in Manicheeism of a particularly disgraceful mythology. In some respects the system recalls those of the Egyptian Gnostics, and in others Marcionism. Mani was a capable organiser. He not only prophesied that his religion would conquer the world, but, like Marc ion, he set it in a strong close-knit framework. Like Marcionism it taught a dual origin of life and the universe, and the perpetual antagonism of the two supreme principles, the one good and the other evil. It advocated much the same kind of materially inspired austerity, prohibitions of certain foods and drinks and of marriage. On the other hand the sect was twofold. There were the Elect, bound to all observances, and the Hearers who accepted the system and would one day qualify for salvation by passing into the ranks of the Elect, but who, until then, had no more onerous obligation than to hold fast to their resolution to do so. For St. Augustine the system had the same general attraction that all Gnostic systems held for the educated mind. It professed, ultimately, to give a purely rational explanation of the riddle of life, of man and his destiny, the nature of God, the problem of evil. It did not, like the Church, offer a teaching which, very often, was above the power of reason to understand. The Manichees knew; and they would, in time, teach the disciple all. There was about the system a great parade of learning, philosophical and astrological; it had all the appearance of being the academic thing it seemed. It had the further advantage, for Augustine, that it offered a way to be at rest intellectually without first regulating the moral disorder of his life. For nine years he remained in the sect never quite so secure as he would have liked; and then came Scepticism, and enough of Aristotle to shake to bits what security he had; and, the great Manichee of the day failing to restore his confidence in the system, Augustine abandoned it. He was back once more in the chaos of conflicting doubts and then, in 383, there came a nomination to the chair of rhetoric in the western capital, Milan. Augustine accepted it gladly and, with the sermons of the city's bishop, St. Ambrose, at which he most assiduously assisted, his intellectual life passed into another and richer phase. In the first place St. Ambrose, too, was a rhetorician though by genius and not profession; and through his oratory something of the thought of the greatest of Christian philosophers hitherto, Origen, came to influence Augustine. Catholicism and philosophy were, then, by no means incompatible. The religion of the Church could survive the test of philosophical discussion, could possibly be the shrine of that Wisdom so long sought. Also the sermons at Milan enlightened Augustine's prejudiced ignorance. Catholics, he knew now, had not an anthropomorphic idea of God. Nevertheless, Augustine was still far from Catholicism. There still remained his old difficulty that all is matter; and since it was impossible to explain materially the God of the Catholic Theology how could the Church's religion be true? Deliverance came through Neoplatonism, with its insistence that the spiritual world is a reality, that it is self-sufficient, immutable, its truths necessarily, universally valid, and that to the spiritual the material is, and must be, subject. God then, his reason now acknowledged, was Spirit and spirit, too, the soul; evil was no creature but lack of being. The last barrier between Augustine's intellect and the Church was down. There still remained the facts of sense, and the legacy in his soul of the years of moral disorder. Here, too, alas, his primary deliverer was Neoplatonism alas, for just as truly as the Neoplatonic speculation about spirit ran easily to Pantheism, so, in the practical order, it ran to a wrongly ordered asceticism, an asceticism based on the idea of the radical opposition of spirit and matter. The divine in man, the soul, is the prisoner of the material. The soul can never be free, never realise its possibilities until the body is broken by systematic constraint, the sense-nature ruthlessly destroyed. In nothing is the opposition of spirit and matter so evident as in what relates to sex, and after a life of sexual disorder Augustine verged on desperation. faced with the habits that threatened to keep him permanently exiled from the Church and Christ. To the Church he came but, in morals as in intellectual assent, by way of Neoplatonism whence the violently-phrased reaction, the language, for example, about sex that is almost a denunciation, the statements that even Christian marriage involves a contamination of spirit. It is a reaction whose colour here is Neoplatonic and not Christian at all. but from it derived a tradition that lived on among Christian writers for centuries. The immediate effect upon Augustine of his new discoveries was to drive him yet nearer to despair. Despite the very evident urge of his senses Adeodatus' mother had gone, and he had taken a mistress in her place he refused to marry. There was a last most violent struggle of all, and then it ended as the saint himself describes in the most famous passage of all his writings- the reading of the heroism of the Christian ascetics, the ensuing hour of despair broken by the child's voice " Tolle, lege" and the happening on the words of St. Paul. "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences." Grace alone can set man free from the slavery to sin. Thenceforward he knew only peace, and giving in his name he was prepared for the sacrament, and at Easter, 387, St. Ambrose baptised him. Since that time Augustine had lived with his friends the life of a monk on what property he retained at Tagaste, the little town in Proconsular Numidia where he was born. He was no doubt the most famous man of the place when, in 391, an accidental circumstance of a visit to Hippo compelled his acceptance of the priesthood. Two years later, and with the Council of Hippo he made his first entry into the history of Donatism. In the June of that year (393) the domestic quarrels of the Donatists had come to a head and a great council of their bishops at Cabarsussi had deposed the primate, Primian, and installed Maxim Ian in his place. There seemed a chance of appeals from the defeated party for admission to the Catholic Church. One of the matters for which this Council of Hippo was called was to decide the conditions on which such reconciliation should be effected, and at the council St. Augustine, simple priest though he was, was asked to preach to the bishops. Three years later he was himself Bishop of Hippo, in the very heart of the Donatist country, the stronghold of the party of Primian, where the Circumcellions had it all their own way; and where once he came himself very near to death at their hands. He was soon the recognised leader of the Catholics. By his tireless activity, his innumerable letters, his sermons, his treatises, songs he wrote for the people, and anti- Donatist placards to cover the walls, he was gradually putting new life into the laity, while the sudden apparition of a first class mind among the bishops was transforming the hierarchy also. To win victories in controversy, however, was far indeed from Augustine's aim. It was the re-union of the Church and the convincing of the Donatists that he desired; and side by side with the controversy there went on a persistent effort, maintained with a patience and charity that never tired, to open up negotiations with the Donatist bishops. The council of Catholic bishops decided for this policy in 401, and again in 403. But each time the Donatists held aloof. On the other hand the anti-Catholic violence steadily increased, and after the failure of the last attempt at negotiation the bishops appealed to the emperor, Honorius, (395- 423) for protection. The edict of February, 405, was his reply. The Donatists were to be considered as heretics, to be proscribed as such and rooted out. The new edict was undoubtedly a severe blow. The realisation that the State would now protect the Catholics, lost to the Donatists all those converts whom they had gained through the terror, and it doubtless lost them also a great number of their own more indifferent members. But the edict was by no means so consistently applied as to destroy the sect outright. With the assassination of the all-powerful minister Stilico (408) there came a change of policy. But the bishops appealed, and the edict of 405 was renewed. In 410 the policy was a second time reversed, and an edict of tolerance published. The situation was by this time easily worse than at any time for twenty years. Once more the bishops appealed, and this time the emperor adopted the often discussed plan of a conference between the two episcopates. It was to take place at Carthage under the presidency of a high imperial official; the procedure was carefully drawn up; official stenographers were appointed, and on June 1, 411, the rival armies of bishops 286 Catholics and 279 Donatists, two bishops to almost every see in the country came together. It was a weary encounter, as all who knew the history of the controversy could no doubt have foretold. The Donatists had no case in theology, in law or in history. They had no argument except the fact that they had survived for a hundred years. Naturally and necessarily they made the greatest possible use of the only tactics open to them obstruction and delay. The president decided that they had no case and must submit, and the following January (412) a new imperial decree confirmed his judgement. All Donatists were ordered to return to the Catholic Church under pain of banishment; their churches and other property were confiscated and handed over to the Catholics. Commissioners appeared everywhere to carry out the decree; and since, this time, there was no reversal of the policy, the end of Donatism seemed assured. But before the Catholics could flatter themselves that the double influence of Catholic propaganda and the imperial laws had converted the mass of the schismatics, the Vandal invasion came (429) to wrest Africa for a century from the rule of Rome and subject it to barbarians who were militant Arians, fanatically anti-Catholic.

ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE HERESY OF PELAGIUS Donatism, for all the importance of the questions it raised as to the nature of the Church and the validity of sacraments, had been, in itself, a purely local matter. It was hardly disposed of by the imperial decree of 412 when there came to Africa a more far- reaching trouble. This was a new theory of the relation in which the restored humanity of the Christian stood to its Restorer, a theory so far-reaching, indeed, that it involved nothing less than a revolution in the traditional idea of the redeeming activity of Jesus Christ. The author of the theory was the British monk Pelagius, important hitherto not so much as a scholar or theologian, for all his learning, but as a director of souls. He was a man of holy life, given to ascetic practices and held in high esteem at Rome, where he lived during the closing years of the fourth century. With him were associated another Briton, Celestius, and, later on, an Italian bishop, Julian of Eclanum, who organised the ideas of Pelagius into a reasoned system of thought. Man, according to the new theory, was by his nature free to do evil or not. Whatever his activities they were his alone, and they were the only source of what merit he possessed in the sight of God, his only title to any reward. The human will is all-powerful, and there is nothing to hinder the man who so chooses from living a life of perfection. The traditional Catholic doctrine that the sin of the first man Adam had, for one of its effects, the loss to all Adam's descendants of certain of the privileges with which he was created, and for another the sowing in their souls of an inclination to sin, was rejected. Adam's sin, the Pelagians maintained, affected his progeny as a bad example indeed, but not otherwise. Human nature itself had not in any way suffered by his lapse. As Adam was created so were his descendants, who, therefore, stood in no need of any special divine aid to heal their nature. Nor did they stand in need of any special help in order to act rightly. For this, the free will of their unimpaired human nature was all-sufficient. Divine intervention could make the right choice in action easier, but the choice itself was within the capability of all. Men, since Adam had chosen to choose wrongly, had shown themselves depraved; but, since the nature of man remained unimpaired, no restoration of human nature was called for, no new life needed to replace an old thing tainted and vitiated, no regeneration. Baptism then was not a new birth. The divine action of the Redeemer upon the souls of the baptised, whether in the redeeming action of His death or in His subsequent glorified life, is not a principle animating man from within his very soul, but a thing wholly external the stimulus of a moral lesson, enforced indeed by the most powerful of all examples, but nothing more. The mystery of the Redemption, if Pelagius was right, was emptied of its main significance, the Incarnation became a wonder wholly out of proportion with its object. Finally, if in the work of his salvation man can succeed without the divine assistance, what place is there in the scheme of things for religion at all? God becomes a mere inspector of man's chart of duties, any inter-relation of love, confidence, gratitude disappears. Prayer is a non-sense. The theory was, in fact, a most radical deformation of the very essence of Christianity, and it must produce inevitably in all who held it a corresponding deformation of character. The Pelagians, for whom humility was an impossibility, were, in their spiritual life, really cultivating themselves. Their own spiritual achievement was the chief object of their attention, and with their theory all the old harsh pride of the Stoics returned to the Christian Church. It was as refugees fleeing before Alaric that, in the year of the sack of Rome (410), Pelagius and Celestius came to Africa, Pelagius halting there but for a moment on his way to the East, Celestius staying to seek admission into the presbyterate of Carthage. Carthage, Jerusalem and Rome are the theatres of the different crises of the next ten years. Celestius, apparently, made no secret of his views and when he applied for ordination found himself denounced to the bishop as a heretic (411). There was an enquiry, Celestius was asked to abjure a series of propositions that summed up his theory, and when he refused he was excommunicated. Whereupon he too left Africa for the East, and, at Ephesus, succeeded in obtaining the ordination he sought. He left behind him in Africa a great number of disciples, drawn chiefly from the better educated classes and from those dedicated to the higher life of asceticism. It was in the endeavour to undo this work of Celestius that St. Augustine first came into the controversy, exposing the tendencies of the theory in private letters, in sermons and in books. Pelagius himself, meanwhile, was well established in Jerusalem and thanks to the severity of his life, to his powerful friends, and to the Greek ignorance of Latin, he pursued his way unhindered. There was, however, another Latin ascetic in Palestine, a much greater man than Pelagius, and, even in his old age, an utterly tireless hunter-out of novel untraditional theories. This was St. Jerome, and it was only a matter of time before he turned upon Pelagius all the attention of his acute mind and his biting pen. The Bishop of Jerusalem, Pelagius' patron, was forced into action, and his protege summoned before a synod to explain himself. He evaded the points at issue by using phrases whose ambiguity was not apparent to the Easterns, inexperienced in the tierce and quart of this particular controversy, and the synod, without condemning Pelagius, recommended that the matter be referred to Rome (July, 415). St. Jerome was left to prepare his next move. This time he was reinforced by allies from the West two bishops of Gaul, exiled through a political revolution, and a young Spanish priest, Orosius, sent by St. Augustine. The Bishop of Jerusalem had proved fallible. The appeal was now made to his superior, the Metropolitan of Cesarea. A new synod was called to meet at Diospolis, and at Diospolis (December, 415) the comedy of the earlier synod was repeated. The bishops from Gaul were kept away by illness; Pelagius again had his skilfully ambiguous submission to offer; and, yet again, the bishops found it satisfactory. Orosius returned to Africa with the news of his failure; and the African bishops determined on a formal joint appeal to Rome. Two great councils were held, at Milevis and at Carthage, and with their exposition of the traditional doctrine there were sent also to the pope Innocent I, 402-417 letters from the two Gallic bishops, the minutes of Celestius' condemnation in 411 and a letter, drawn up by St. Augustine, explaining the controversy: all this was some time in the late summer, or autumn, of 416. In March of the new year the pope's reply arrived. The African doctrine was approved and the excommunication of Pelagius and Celestius ratified. So far the controversy had progressed along the accustomed lines, according to the normal procedure in cases of a charge of heresy. If progress was slow that was but natural, considering the distance which separated the protagonists. But now, in 417, there came into the affair, to add very much to its complexity, the old trouble of ecclesiastical politics, of episcopal ambitions and jealousies. The death of the pope (March 12, 417) was its opportunity. The new pope, Zosimus, was, for some reason or other, very much under the influence of Proclus, Bishop of Arles, the city which was, at the moment, the most important city of the Western Empire, the seat of government of the day's one strong man, the future Emperor Constantius III. Proclus had helped Constantius and Constantius had made him bishop, and upon the Bishop of Arles the new pope now heaped privilege upon privilege, making him to all intents and purposes a vice-pope in southern Gaul-despite the protests of the other bishops. One urgent motive of their protests was their poor opinion of this favourite of both pope and emperor. Proclus had been installed as bishop in the place of a bishop uncanonically thrust out to make room for him. That predecessor was still alive was none other than the chief accuser of Pelagius at the synod of Diospolis! Now, thanks to Proclus' influence with the new pope, the most active adversaries of Pelagius in the East were themselves excommunicated. The hopes of the Pelagian party rose, and Celestius himself went to Rome, offering submission to Zosimus and offering, too, an acceptance of the doctrine of Pope Innocent's letter to Africa, though he still refused to abjure the propositions for maintaining which he had been condemned in 411. Pelagius, too, made a kind of submission, sending to the pope a long treatise on the freedom of the will in which, more haeretico, carefully chosen ambiguities masked what was new in his teaching. Influenced by these reasoned protestations Zosimus reopened the case, and wrote to Africa what amounted to a panegyric of Pelagius and Celestius, in which they figured as the calumniated victims of the malice of the bishops! (November, 417). The African bishops sent an elaborate reply, detailing the shiftiness of Pelagius' habitual mode of procedure and the pope (letter of March 21, 418) thereupon capitulated. His letter reached Carthage just as a great council of two hundred and more bishops was about to open. Of this assembly St. Augustine was the soul. It drew up a statement of the faith against Pelagius in nine canons and sent these to Zosimus with a letter asking his approval. Also, to leave no stone unturned, the African bishops approached the emperor, Honorius, and obtained a rescript ordering the pursuit and suppression of Pelagius wherever found. The pope now acted with decision and in a document called the Tractoria definitely condemned Pelagius and Celestius and their doctrines. About the same time an eastern council, too (at Antioch, in 418), condemned Pelagius, and with this he disappears from history. Pelagianism was now an officially proscribed heresy, and orders went forth from the government that all the bishops should formally sign a prescribed form of condemnation. In Africa there was nothing but willing support for the measure, but in Italy, while there was no objection to condemning Pelagius, there was a certain reluctance to sign the condemnation if in so doing the signatory was taken as approving the theories of St. Augustine. This was especially the case in southern Italy, among the bishops who were immediately subject to the pope. Eighteen of them openly repudiated what they styled "the African Dogma", and the pope promptly deposed them. With this resistance a new phase of the heresy begins, its leader one of the eighteen, Julian, Bishop of Eclanum. Julian was a scholar, a master of logic an Aristotelian it is interesting to note a controversialist, perhaps, rather than a theologian. He it was who worked the ideas of Pelagius into an ordered system, and the history of Pelagianism is, very largely, the history of Julian's controversy with St. Augustine. With Julian, who was personally well known to the saint, as his father had been before him, the whole character of the movement changes. It is no longer merely defensive, resorting to one subterfuge after another in its furtive endeavour to escape condemnation. Henceforward it is a bold and vigorous attack on St. Augustine in the name, of course, of a more primitive and truer faith. But Julian found himself isolated. He went to the East, as Pelagius had done, and in the East, too, he found hardly a supporter except in the old Bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore, with the tendencies of whose naturalistic theology he was the real father of the Nestorian heresy soon to trouble the East Julian's theories of grace accorded well. In Theodore of Mopsuestia, then, Pelagianism found its last patron, and in far off Cilicia the main movement gradually faded from sight. Julian survived until 454, never reinstated, despite his efforts, as Bishop of Eclanum. The only other country where, after the condemnation of 418, Pelagianism survived in any force, was Britain. Here, since the Roman general Constantine had led away the legions to assist him in his desperate bid for the imperial throne nine years before, the imperial mandates could safely be ignored. More than one bishop was openly Pelagian, and the heresy seemed likely to prosper. That it ultimately failed, and that its followers were rallied to the Roman faith, was due to Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, whom in 429, and again in 447, the pope, St. Celestine I (422-432), sent to Britain for this purpose. With this triumph of St. Germanus in Pelagius' native country the history of his heresy, as an organised anti-Catholic thing, comes to an end.

THE INFLUENCE OF ST. AUGUSTINE St. Augustine, however, did more than merely fight the Pelagians as the great controversialist he undoubtedly was. The need of the moment brought from him the work which is his chief title to glory as a theologian, the construction of a whole theory to explain the original state of man, the nature and effect of the first man's fall, the nature of the Redemption, and the way in which, in virtue of the Redemption, God acts upon the souls of the redeemed. It is a work in which he had singularly little help from preceding writers, and a work which was to give rise, as it still gives rise, to passionate discussions; a work, too, since proved erroneous in more than one point, but a work which in its main lines has long since passed into the traditional theology of the Catholic Church. Adam was, by a special act of the divine liberality, created with the gift of immortality, with a will inclined to good, a harmony of reason and senses, with infused knowledge, in habitual justice. He sinned, and his sin is transmitted ever after to all his posterity, as Scripture, the Christian writers, the rite of Baptism and a point of which St. Augustine makes very much indeed the chronic misery of mankind testify. The universal misery from which no man has ever escaped, the opposition between spirit and flesh, especially in what relates to sex, are for the saint a final culminating argument, and in the anarchic desire for sex pleasure that, of itself, denies all restraints, he sees that effect of Adam's sin through the instrumentality of which it is transmitted to us. "Hoc est malum peccati in quo nascitur omnis homo." This is not a radical vitiation of human nature. Human nature is not, since Adam, a thing of simple badness. But it suffers a permanent inherited weakness, a disability that is inherent and is therefore transmitted to all who possess a human nature. The channel by which that transmission is effected is, once again, the anarchic activity of sex-desire which accompanies the act of sex. Adam's progeny then, is, inevitably, born deprived of those special gifts immortality and the like which graced him, and, deprived of the will's inclination to good, needs henceforward a special divine help if it is to avoid sin. All mankind, since Adam's sin, left to itself is inevitably, eternally, lost: a mass of perdition, a mass condemned of itself helpless, in a pit whence nothing but a new divine act can extract it. From this abyss God has in fact delivered us all, creating man anew, giving mankind the beginnings of a new life through the Redeeming death of the God-Man Jesus Christ. For St. Augustine the religion of the Church is essentially a redemption, a redemption based on the Incarnation. In the new arrangement, God, as always, gives everything, even the first help to arrive at that belief upon which all is built. With the God-Man Jesus Christ, by incorporation with Him, Humanity is to be re-created, made one with Him in Baptism and the Holy Eucharist and this not in so many isolated individual unions, but as a corporate body. This idea of the salvation of Humanity as the members of Christ members of a body whose head is the God- Man is the very heart of St. Augustine's theology. His explanation of the system by which from the head the members receive direction and power to move in more technical language his theory of Grace is but his application of this theology to a special point. The Redemption is the work of the Incarnate God in His historical earthly activity. This activity is continued, and continuously manifested thenceforward, in all the subsequent supernatural activity of the redeemed: manifested as the very source and internal principle of that supernatural activity. It is then really Jesus Christ Who prays, Who lives, Who performs the salvific actions in the individual. This is the meaning of St. Augustine's elaborate, well-articulated theory of Grace. It is St. Paul re-thought, the tradition set out afresh with new profundity, new lucidity, with passionate fervour, disciplined logic and a wholly new rhetorical splendour, in answer to the menace of Pelagius' sterilising divorce of man from God in the spiritual life. Thanks to St. Augustine's genius the tradition would conquer and mould anew the piety, the interior life, of all the succeeding centuries. It is this which most of all survives of his work. Far from Grace the freely-given divine aid that makes possible man's production of actions supernaturally valuable being unnecessary to Christians, Christianity is essentially Grace! and the primary attitude of the Christian is humility, the complete consciousness of his unlimited dependence on God. Nor can the Christian be solitary in his Christianity, for Christianity's very life is the union between all who are Christians, the union between each as a Christian and Christ Himself, so that the whole Church is nothing more than "the one Christ loving Himself." The importance of the Church in St. Augustine's theology it is impossible to overestimate. The system constructed by St. Augustine had its difficulties- particularly in the matter of adjusting the relations between the divine activity of Grace and man's free-will, difficulties about which, after further centuries, men still dispute as keenly as in St. Augustine's time. To the Catholics of his own day St. Augustine was the great champion of the church against the Manichees, the Donatists, the Pelagians. To the Catholic of a day fifteen hundred years later he is still the doctor of Grace and Ecclesiology, the builder who set on the stocks every single one of the later treatises of systematic theology. But to Catholics of the thousand years which followed his death he was more even than all this. He was almost the whole intellectual patrimony of medieval Catholicism, a mine of thought and erudition which the earlier Middle Ages, for all its delving, never came near to exhausting. He was the bridge between two worlds, and over that bridge there came to the Catholic Middle Ages something of the educational ideals and system of Hellenism; there came the invaluable cult of the ancient literature, the tradition of its philosophy and all the riches of Christian Antiquity. In St. Augustine were baptised, on that momentous Easter Day of 387, the schooling, the learning, the learned employments, and the centuries of human experience in the ways of thought, which were to influence and shape all the medieval centuries. His own great achievement, and the authority it gave to his genius, legalised for all future generations of Catholics the use in the service of Catholic thought of the old classic culture. For this prince of theologians is no less a prince of the humanities, and in himself he determines, once and for all, the Christian attitude to the pre-Christian arts, poetry and thought. This genius, the range of whose mind is encyclopaedic, gifted with an insatiable desire to know yet more, with a passion for work and the temperament of a poet, the disciplined thinker whose very profession it is to reason and expound, saw Christianity as a whole, with a completeness beyond anything that any of his philosophical predecessors had known. And from his masterly understanding there comes the most masterly presentation hitherto seen, and which will endure for nearly a thousand years without a rival, until there comes another mind, as great as his own, and equipped with still better instruments. In theology, beyond what has been already described, St. Augustine is responsible for a philosophically inspired exposition of the teaching on the Trinity which is one of the marvels of Christian thought; and which remains to this day impossible to better. In his teaching on the Incarnation, there is, once again, a richness of new light and a new precision, thanks to his philosophical mind; and as his exposition of the Trinity precludes the difficulties over whose solution Eastern Catholicism tore itself to shreds, so here his solutions leave no place for the misunderstandings out of which Nestorianism and Monophysitism were to rise. He readily gives philosophy a role in the provinces of faith. Philosophy it is which first of all must test the credentials of faith. If these satisfy the mind, then faith henceforward has the principal role. By faith the mind accepts the mysteries. The office of reasoning is now secondary: the better understanding of truths acquired by faith, the explanation of them and of their mutual harmony. In his own use of reason to explain the truths of faith, St. Augustine employs the philosophy of his adoption, Neoplatonism as he had re-thought it. It was by no means a perfect instrument, as he himself uneasily realised. But with a happy confidence in the ultimate coincidence of all true teaching, relying on the surer way of faith where philosophy failed, he yet managed to build up with Neoplatonism the greatest philosophical exposition of its religion which the Church had yet seen. His was a mind that never ceased to develop, and a recent writer has been able to describe the years of Catholic life to which, with Grace, Neoplatonism brought him as "a continual argument with Neoplatonism. . . a progressive deliverance from Neoplatonism and a growth into essential Christianity". Something of the Neoplatonist spirit, however, survived all this argument, to provide him with problems he never lived to solve and which, unsolved, remained to confuse the philosophical Catholic until the great deliverance wrought by St. Thomas. Like his secular master Plato and unlike Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas St. Augustine has, from the very beginning, been eagerly read far beyond the limited circle of professional philosophers and theologians. "There was passion in his philosophy," it has been excellently said; and again, equally truly that " everything he writes is inspired by (his own mystical experiences) and looks backward or forward to them." No other theologian is so personal. Never before nor since, was there given to the sacred sciences a thinker for whom, in this passionate degree, there was but one reality the action of God in his own soul and a thinker of genius so mighty that, writing all he wrote in the light of this reality, he has somehow written the history of the hearts of all who read him. It is this passion for psychological self-portrayal, the dominant colour of all his work, which has led so many of his admirers to see in him the first of the moderns; and it is undoubtedly the explanation of his unsurpassed hold-which not even his most serious defects have shaken on the Christian imagination, affection and understanding. It is also, inevitably, one great source of weakness. Another source of weakness is the fact that his great corpus of thought and learning lacks systematic organisation. The score of mighty tomes that confronts the student of St. Augustine is the varied production of a man, who, for all that nature cast him for a student, was forced for the best part of his time into the less congenial life of a man of affairs. His works are the productions of a busy bishop, harassed with a thousand temporal cares, from the ordering of diocesan charities to the high business of the State, and it is not surprising that, occasionally, they suffer from a lack of co-ordination and harmony. Thence, too, no doubt, derive in part the apparent and unexplained contradictions despite the famous Retractations written as a correction at the end of his days. St. Augustine never had Newman's comparative leisure in which to revise and to bring into harmony the detail of his vast output of half a century's exposition and polemic. Hence it is, that often enough, both sides in a vital dispute can make some claim to call him their master; and that partial study has sometimes been able to make out of him whatever it chooses. But whatever the flaws in the vast work, the work remained and remains. St. Augustine, in the East only a name, is in the West everything for the next eight hundred years, and without some knowledge of him the life of these centuries is unintelligible. There is one book, especially, of St. Augustine which never ceased to be read and studied for the next thousand years and to influence western thought and even political action the De Civitate Dei. Not only was this a principal means whereby much of the saint's theological teaching passed into the minds of others than the professional theologians, into the minds of schoolmasters and lawyers and administrators and even rulers, forming the mind of the educated layman, but the book was the first attempt to understand the meaning of history, and it was the foundation of all the later Christian speculation about what we now call social philosophy. For a thousand years it was the European's guide to the rights and duties of man vis a vis the state, his vade mecum in the complexity where he found himself, subject at once of his temporal lord and of the spiritual kingdom which was the Church. It is a very lengthy book, and, in its discursive somewhat meandering fashion, it is encyclopaedic in the generality of problems it raises and endeavours to solve. There is here, in fact. a little of everything: brilliantly written religious apologetic; criticism of non-Christian ideals and solutions, that is humane, humorous, witty; expositions of the Christian mysteries fired with the fervour of a great love. It was the most popular, and to this extent, the most influential, book St. Augustine ever wrote; and its influence is by no means ended yet. The City of God took the saint something like fourteen years to write, and he published the parts as they were completed, between the years 412 and 426. When he began it he was in the full maturity of his powers; he was an old man of seventy-two when he wrote the last wonderful pages "on the quality of the vision with which the saints shall see God in the world to come," and " of the eternal felicity of the City of God, and the perpetual Sabbath." What inspired the book was the storm of anti-Christian recrimination that followed Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. Had the empire not gone over to Christianity, said the pagans, those things would never have happened. So the saint examines Paganism, and its history, in the light of Christian teaching and ideals. He lays bare what Paganism was, and must be. and what its effects on human nature. And he sets forth, constructively, the positive hope, and achievement, of Christianity and the Catholic Church. The Church as it exists, is not, indeed, adequated with the saint's City of God, any more than the ancient pagan empire is identified with that other "city" which is under the rule of sin. But the vision is presented of the Church, God's creation, as "the new humanity in process of formation, and [of] its earthly history [as] that of the building of the City of God which has its completion in eternity." Not only is a solution offered for the difficulties urged by the pagans, but a solution too for those difficulties which the facts of imperfect Christianity present, only too continuously, to believers also. The work brings out the ideal of the Church "as a dynamic social power," and it expounds a Christian social doctrine, of moral freedom and of personal responsibility, that is necessarily fatal to ideas of the state as superhuman and ever omnipotent, and to an organism so destructive of human personality as was the ancient Roman empire. St. Augustine is commonly declared to be, by this book, the founder of what is called the philosophy of history. It is no less true that the theories he there sets forth "first made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon a free personality and a common effort towards moral ends." The City of God was the favourite reading of Charlemagne, whose empire may be fairly considered as the mighty attempt of a somewhat less than saintly Christian genius, to set that City up as an actual political institution; and seven hundred years later still, it was with a series of public lectures on the work that the author of the Utopia introduced himself to London, and to Europe, as a political thinker and reformer.

PRISCILLIAN Of the history of the Church in Spain in the first three centuries after Christ we know almost nothing. St. Paul was, in all likelihood, one of its first evangelists. It gave martyrs to the Church in the persecution of Decius. Fifty years later than Decius, on the eve of the greater persecution of Diocletian, its bishops, to judge from what we know of the Council of Elvira (c. 300-305), were preoccupied with the problems of a Catholicism so extensive and so universally popular that in many respects it had become gravely relaxed. There were Catholics who, even in time of peace, continued to make their offerings to the pagan gods. Marriages between Christians and the heathen priests were not unknown. The clergy showed too keen an inclination to engage in commerce bishops no less than priests and deacons. Others practised as moneylenders. The habit or example of idolatry was still strong and, lest they should be worshipped, all pictures were now ordered to be removed from the churches Clerics who are married are to live with their wives as with their sisters, under pain of deposition. Rules are laid down for the cases of conversion from such special classes as the charioteers of the circus, and the comedians from the theatre who, once converted, are strictly forbidden to return to their unhallowed profession. With this council, held in the first ten years of the fourth century, the veil falls once more on our knowledge of the early Spanish Church. When it lifts, some seventy years later, it is to disclose a Church torn by internal controversy, and to reveal one of the most curious figures of all Church history. This was Priscillian. He was a man of great distinction, well-born, cultivated, wealthy, gifted with eloquent speech, with a genius for propaganda, and he was wholly devoted to the cult of the ascetic life. The different churches in Spain already by this time had each of them its circle of ascetics men and women who had specially dedicated themselves by a vow of continency in a spiritual union with Our Lord. They would continue to live in their own homes, but all follow a more or less universal rule, which prescribed special daily prayers, daily reunions in the church, additional fasts, and abstinences, and a sober manner of dress the women for example were veiled, wore no jewellery, used no cosmetics. They would be, in Spain as elsewhere, the local church's agents in the organised charities that played so great a part in the primitive Christian life, care of the sick, of widows and orphans, relief of the indigent poor. Priscillian was not in any sense a pioneer in this ascetic movement, but his powerful personality gave it a new impetus and speedily began to transform it. Gradually, the multitudes whom he influenced and his disciples grew in number very speedily indeed looked to Priscillian for direction and not to the head of the local church, to Priscillian and his private inspirations. And Priscillian was not limited by the traditional sources of Christian Asceticism. The myths of the Gnostically-inspired, apocryphal gospels served him with ideas no less than the genuine Scriptures. The basis of his ascetic practices again was not Christian, but the old oriental theories of the radical badness of matter, and of the inevitable fundamental opposition between matter and spirit. This showed itself in the exaggerated abstinences to which he was given and which he recommended, condemnation of marriage, of the use of wine, and the use of flesh meats as things bad and to be shunned. Little by little his followers began to have the appearance of a sect apart, to whom other members of the Church were as an inferior race. The Priscillianists to anticipate a later name for them-habitually went barefooted. Periodically, at fixed times, they withdrew themselves from the world to give themselves to their own peculiar religious observance in a kind of "retreat." They had their own use of the Holy Eucharist. Women, especially, had an important place in the movement. It was not long before the genius of Priscillian had completely disturbed the Spanish Church, especially in the west and northwest, in Portugal and Galicia. His ascetic reputation and what was known of the severity of his life, were, for many people, decisive. Thousands joined him and among them even some of the bishops. Other bishops began to question the tendencies of the movement, to suspect the principles that inspired it and then to organise against it. In 379 they sent to consult the pope, Damasus I, and the following year, in a great council at Saragossa, a number of the practices to which the followers of Priscillian were said to be given, were forbidden under the strictest penalties. How strong, by this time, the movement had grown may be judged from the next event in the story the election of Priscillian himself as Bishop of Avila on the very morrow of the Council of 380. Immediately he assumed the offensive, and made a great effort to oust his superior, the Metropolitan of Lusitania. But that bishop, Idace, was not to be easily overthrown. He had an influential friend at the imperial court no other indeed than St. Ambrose and the only result of Priscillian's manoeuvre was an edict from the emperor, Gratian, in general terms, against "false bishops and Manichees." Already there was, in this, menace of what the future might hold for Priscillian, for the Manichee-to whose anti-social morality his own alleged customs bore so striking a resemblance had been under the ban of the empire since long before the conversion of Constantine. Priscillian, with some friends, then set out for Italy, for Rome and Milan to assure himself of the support of both pope and emperor. The pope would not receive them; but from Milan they obtained, in the end, a decree which in effect annulled that from whose execution they had fled. Once more Priscillian was free to take the offensive, this time with the civil authority behind him. The leaders opposed to him, menaced now by the State as disturbers of the peace, took themselves to Treves, the seat of the pretorian prefecture of the Gauls in which Spain lay. There they found support in the bishops and the high officials, but Priscillian's influence in Milan was still too great to be overthrown. Suddenly the whole situation changed when, in 383, Maximus, the imperial commander in Britain, declared himself emperor. He landed in Gaul with an army and Gratian, marching north to meet him, was assassinated at Lyons. Maximus was master of Britain, of Gaul and of Spain. Of this empire Treves became the capital, and still at Treves was the bishop who was Priscillian's chief enemy Ithacus, a man of loose life, worldly, ambitious and, as the enemy of the bishop who had found protectors at the court of Milan, likely to find a favourable hearing with the victorious Maximus. Maximus was sufficiently won round by Ithacus' charges to order that Priscillian and a like-minded colleague, Instantius, should be arrested and tried at Bordeaux by a council of bishops. Instantius was deposed, but Priscillian, refusing a trial, appealed from the bishops to the emperor. The scene changed to Treves and this time it was to the criminal courts, on criminal charges, that Ithacus denounced his rival. Priscillian was tried on an indictment accusing him of sorcery, of diffusing obscene doctrines, of presiding at midnight reunions of women, and of stripping himself naked to pray. With six associates he was condemned; and, since sorcery was a capital offence, executed. The sentences and their execution caused a sensation. St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, had protested in advance against any sentence of death. Ithacus, in his plea against Priscillian, had made the most of his congenial opportunity to demonstrate publicly against all asceticism and all ascetics, even to the extent of denouncing St. Martin himself as a Manichee. The saint, undismayed, had continued to urge his plea that in an affair which concerned questions of Catholic doctrine, the lay court had no jurisdiction. The emperor had promised that there should be no question of a death sentence and the bishop returned home. Then, influenced by the anti- Priscillianist bishops, Maximus had ordered an enquiry and, on the prefect's report that Priscillian was guilty of sorcery, had ordered the trial that resulted in the conviction and the executions. Nor was this the end. Commissioners were sent to Spain to deal similarly with Priscillian's adherents. St. Martin returned to Treves and broke off all relations with the Bishop of Treves and those who had shared in the enquiries and the trial. Nor did he cease to protest against the iniquity of the death sentences, until the emperor promised, as the gauge of his communion, to halt the persecution then beginning in Spain. The pope, too (Siricius, 384-396), asked for an explanation of the proceedings and, fully informed by the emperor, excommunicated Ithacus and his associates. Nor would St. Ambrose when, in the course of the year, a political embassy brought him to Treves, give any recognition to the bishop, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death." For three years, however, despite St. Martin, the repression continued until in 388 Maximus was slain and the West was once more ruled from Milan. With this restoration of Valentinian II, Priscillian came, posthumously, into something like his own. With the other supporters of the late usurper the persecutors of Priscillian paid the inevitable penalty. Ithacus and the others were deposed and exiled. The remains of Priscillian were brought back from Germany with all manner of ceremony to become the centre of a popular cultus, and soon Spain was once more given over to the bitter fights of religious factions, Galicia and the West ever more strongly Priscillianist, Betica and Carthaginia just as strongly orthodox. For years the episcopate was divided. A council at Saragossa (395) excommunicated the Priscillianist bishops and these, reverting to the manoeuvre of their master, fled to Milan to enlist the support of the court. St. Ambrose showed himself sympathetic, but insisted on an abjuration of Priscillian's distinctive doctrines and on the renunciation of the cult of his memory and his remains. The exiles consented, and thereby gained the support not only of St. Ambrose but also of the pope. They returned to Spain only to break their promises, and at a new council (Toledo, 400) they were yet again condemned. This time the condemnation broke the unity of the party, for while some of the bishops submitted, others remained obstinate. Curiously enough the submission was the cause of yet another division. Rome, consulted as to the procedure to be adopted towards the repentant bishops, gave its traditional advice that they should be shown every consideration. Whereupon, as always, a faction ""more Catholic than the pope" showed itself, declining to re-admit the repentant Priscillianists to communion and breaking off all relations with those who did so. There were now three kinds of Christians in Spain, the Priscillianists, the moderate Catholics with whom, thanks to Rome, the repentant Priscillianists were now united, and the fanatical Catholic opponents of the reunion a lamentable state of affairs after thirty years of controversy. Before any real improvement could take place there came, in 406, the flood of the great barbarian invasion to submerge for a time, with much else, these evidences of religious weakness and dissension.

THE ROMAN SEE AND THE WESTERN CHURCHES The history of the Roman Church in the first three centuries is noteworthy for two things. First, there is really very little mention of it at all for much of the period we have little more than the names of its bishops. Secondly, whatever record of it has survived is almost invariably concerned with its exercise of a supervisory authority in the affairs of the other churches. It is in this role, indeed, that the Roman Church makes its first entry into history with the intervention at Corinth which is the subject of St. Clement's celebrated letter. Later still, the exercise of this primatial power, so to call it, and the reactions to that exercise, are the chief matters of the history of some seventy years the years when in turn Rome imperially corrects all the great churches of Africa and the East; Ephesus in Polycrates, Carthage in St. Cyprian, Alexandria in St. Denis. The Roman primacy, whatever the use its bishops made of it, is one of the undeniable features of primitive church history. But it is also a thing which functions only on special occasions. There existed also, side by side with this universal jurisdiction of the Roman Church, and in addition to its purely local authority over its own actual members, the clergy and the faithful of the city of Rome, yet a third and intermediate kind of jurisdiction whose sphere was originally the bishops of Italy and which eventually grew to be, what it is to-day, an effective, continuous, supervision over all the churches of the Church Universal, really felt in the everyday life of each. That development which has made the papacy of modern times the source and centre of all Catholic life, and thanks to which the popes can, and do, effectively control that life's every movement, has been the work of the sixteen hundred years between Constantine and Pius XII, Trent and the Council of 1870 being its latest stages. Its first stages are to be observed in the first century in which the Roman Church had any real opportunity to organise the administration of its primacy, the century following Constantine's conversion. It was also the last century, for very long indeed, in which political conditions made any such organising really possible; for it closed with the " Barbarian Invasions " and the dislocation, for generations more, of all organisation but the most primitive. In what relation then beyond that of final and ultimate authority did the pope stand to the bishops of the West in this last century before the West was transformed into something new? The bishops of Italy form the nearest group of extra-Roman churches with whom the pope is in contact. Over them, so the canons of Nicea (325) are witness, he exercises such a supervisory jurisdiction as that possessed by the Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt. Thirty years later the Arian troubles have brought the pope of the day, Liberius, into conflict with the emperor. He has been ordered into exile and an imperialist, Felix, intruded into his see. The Bishop of Milan too, the new Western capital which has now displaced Rome, is exiled for the same good reason, and he, too, is given a successor, the notoriously Arian Auxentius. And the imperial power has gone still further. Henceforward it is the Bishop of Milan who exercises this archiepiscopal jurisdiction over the bishops of northern Italy (the civil diocese of Italia). To Rome are now left only the churches of the civil diocese of Rome. Milan, it might seem, was to be an imperially created rival to Rome in the West as Constantinople was about to become in the East. But when the end of Auxentius' long episcopate (355-374) came, he was succeeded by the most eloquent defender of the Roman Supremacy the Church had yet known, St. Ambrose (374-397); also, within seven years of that great man's death Milan had ceased to be the capital. None the less, the metropolitan jurisdiction of the see endured, save over such churches as it had lost to the new centres Aquileia and Ravenna. Over the churches in central and southern Italy and the islands, about 200 sees in all, the pope, during the fourth century, continued to exercise, then, a close and continual supervision. Within this sphere no bishop is consecrated without the pope's consent. The local church elects, but its choice must be ratified at Rome, and the newly-elect must be consecrated by the pope. This is a discipline much older than the letter of Pope Siricius (386) in which it is formally recalled. It is the reason for the mention, in the notices of these earlier popes in the Liber Pontificalis, of the number of those they ordained. For example "This pope," it is Fabian, "held five ordinations, [ordaining] 22 priests, 7 deacons, and 11 bishops for various places." In later times the number grows. Damasus (366-384) ordains 62 bishops, Innocent I (402-417) 54, and St. Leo I (440-461) 185! These bishops of the pope's special province meet annually at Rome on the anniversary of the pope's own consecration (Natale Papae) unless, for some special cause, they are explicitly dispensed. To Rome they apply at every turn for advice in difficulties and the Roman practice is a norm to which they endeavour to conform their own administration. At Rome itself the administration is in the hands of the seven deacons. They are the chiefs of the growing ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and it is from their ranks that the pope is usually chosen. The archdeacon is at this time the most important personage after the pope, and the office is very often a last step before the highest office of all. So was it, for example, with St. Leo the Great. It is to the pope directly that complaints against these bishops are addressed. He investigates, either personally or by delegates, and, when necessary, he deposes the guilty bishop; and the basis and justification of this authority, as the successive popes never tire of repeating, is that they are the heirs of St. Peter. In the affairs of the other churches of Italy, those subject now to the metropolitan authority of Milan, of Aquileia, of Ravenna, the pope interferes but rarely. Normally he has no share in the election of their bishops nor does he consecrate them. Here, as between each church and the Roman, there is yet no systematic centralisation. For all the community of Faith and the full acceptance of the Roman Supremacy to which, let us say, St. Ambrose witnesses, these churches in their everyday administration went their own way. Only for the greater councils did they go to Rome, and only in cases of disputes and appeals did Rome intervene in elections. Otherwise there is a complete administrative autonomy strikingly in contrast with the dependence on Rome in matters of Faith. Beyond the limits of Italy the churches divide into four main groups, those of the (civil) dioceses of Spain and the Gauls, the churches of Africa, and those of the two dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia. Like those Italian churches which lie outside the sphere of Rome's special supervision, these churches too enjoy a wide autonomy. Their bishops are normally elected and if need be deposed without any reference to Rome; and in their ordinary administration they follow each their own interpretation of the traditions. Nevertheless, communication with Rome is frequent, is even continual, and the relation in which these churches all stand to Rome is undoubtedly one of subordination. Spain, when the century opened, numbered close on fifty bishoprics. Its bishops were represented in the several great councils of the century, at Arles in 314 for example and at Sardica in 343 and one of them, Hosius of Cordova, actually presided at Nicea. But though there were so many sees, the higher organisation was defective. There were several metropolitan sees around which the others were grouped provincially, but there was no one central see and never any real unity among the bishops. How extensive the effects of this disunion could be, the troubles centering round Priscillian made very evident. The detail of their history brings out, also, the role of the Roman Church in this distant Western province. It is from Rome that the bishops seek counsel when first they approach the question of Priscillian's orthodoxy; and it is to Rome that Priscillian goes, for the declaration of the purity of his faith that will reinstate him: "ut apud Damasum obiecta purgarent" says the contemporary historian-Damasus, whom Priscillian salutes as senior omnium nostrum, senior et primus. Later still, after the executions of 385, there is again reference to Rome for direction at every stage of the complex sequel, the question of the reconciliation of Priscillian's followers, and the question, deriving therefrom, of the ultra-rigorist Catholic opponents of the reconciliation. There is also the famous letter of Pope Siricius in 385. The Spanish bishops had applied for a ruling on a whole series of important matters. The evils to which the Council of Elvira was a witness, eighty years before, still afflict the Church. There are still to be found Christians who dabble in Paganism and clergy who, after ordination, continue to live with their wives as before. The pope's reply is no mere solution of a case of conscience. It is a peremptory reminder of the law "the things the Apostolic See has decided". "We order," says the pope, "We decree," and to coerce any reluctance to obey there is the menace of excommunication from Rome, and for justification of the threat and proof of the power there is the reminder that through Siricius it is Peter who is speaking. The Roman Supremacy is writ large all over this letter and Rome's consciousness of its universal acceptance in the Church. Nor is it otherwise in Roman Gaul, the vast tract that stretches from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, whose capital is Treves on the Moselle. Gaul was the one province of the West which Arianism had really troubled thanks to the manoeuvres of Constantius II and his Council of Arles in 353. The formation round Saturninus of Arles of a group of pro-Arian bishops, the struggle with them and the easy task of reconciliation once Constantius had disappeared (361) are the most important events of the century which have come down to us. The hero of this struggle and of the restoration was St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, one of the greatest of the earlier Latin ecclesiastical writers, and himself, for four years, an exile for his staunch defiance of the Arian emperor the chief forerunner of St. Ambrose in the theoretical exposition of the limits of Caesar's rights in the Church of Christ. Related to the events of this restoration of Catholicism is the letter Ad Gallos Episcopos, seemingly of Pope Damasus and dating from about 374. Whatever pope wrote it one theory puts it down to Damasus' successor Siricius the letter is a reply to an appeal for judgement. Some sixteen points in all are dealt with, the question of consecrated virgins who have broken their vow, of clerical celibacy, and of the conditions requisite for the lawful ordination of clerics and the consecration of bishops. In the reply the typical Roman notes are all immediately observable-the insistence, for example, that no bishop be consecrated without the consent of his metropolitan, since such would be contrary "to the episcopal discipline of the Apostolic See." The pope nowhere suggests that he is enacting a law. Everywhere he is but reminding the bishops of Gaul of existing law, and yet he speaks as though he were its author and the one primarily responsible for its observance. Ten years later and Rome is again intervening to excommunicate the Gallic bishops who had shared in the grave irregularities which preceded the execution of Priscillian, and in 400, fifteen years later still, a council of Italian bishops continues to refuse these bishops recognition since they have not fulfilled the conditions laid down years before by Ambrose (the late metropolitan of the Italians) and the Roman bishop. Two replies of Pope Innocent I (402-417) to Gallic bishops- Victoricius of Rouen and Exuperius of Toulouse have passed into the very foundations of the great corpus of the Canon Law; and the reign of his successor Zosimus saw the papal intervention suddenly pressed forward to a development that was revolutionary when that pope gave to the Bishop of Arles a kind of superiority over all the metropolitans of Gaul, decreeing that all ordinations of bishops should be referred to him and that through him all the other bishops should henceforward transact all their business with the Roman See. The policy was as unpopular as it was unprecedented, and after a short twelve months it was set aside by the new pope, Boniface I (418-422), and the old regime restored of autonomous provinces each under the rule of its own metropolitan, the Bishop of Narbonne being specifically authorised to disregard the extra-provincial jurisdiction of Arles and to proceed "metropolitani iure munitus et praeceptibus nostris fretus." What the pope was for the scattered churches of Gaul during this century is aptly described in a letter of the pope whose reign brings it to a close Celestine I (422-432). The pope, he declares, is in a post of observation and general superintendence, to arrest untimely developments, to decide and to choose, a post such that "no violation of discipline escapes us" for so far there is but question of discipline. With Africa we come to what probably was the most Catholic province of all the West certainly the province where the Church was most completely organised. To begin with, it was a region extraordinarily rich in bishops; at the time of the Council of 411 there were 470 of them. And, unlike the bishops of Spain and Gaul, this vast assembly was a well-organised body. The bishops of each of the six civil provinces formed together an autonomous ecclesiastical province over which presided, not the metropolitan of any fixed see, but the senior of the bishops. But, in addition to this machinery of provincial councils, the Bishop of Carthage had, since the beginning of the third century, exercised a superior primatial jurisdiction over all. There was also the Concilium Universale of all Africa, and this, meeting regularly once a year, was, with the primacy of Carthage, a most potent means of unity. The churches of Africa were the most perfectly organised of all, and it is symbolical of that organisation that it was from this group that there came the first code of canon law the Codex Canonum Ecclesiae Africanae, published by the Council of Africa of 419. The African Church had another distinction, the tradition of a singular "insularity" in its activity. In the long fight with the Donatists, for example, it never makes appeal for help to other churches; even in this controversy which, more than any other, brings out African understanding of the nature of the Roman primacy, a controversy in which the fact of that primacy and African acceptance of it is the very foundation of the Catholics' case, there is never an appeal to Rome for assistance. And, it is to be noted, Rome allowed for this "insular" habit when it permitted the Africans in the matter of reconciling the Donatists to depart very seriously from the accepted discipline in such matters. The relations with Rome are continuous and friendly. The faith in Rome's supremacy is as evident here, and at this time, as in any other part of the Church. But the administrative separation could hardly be more complete. Before the period had ended, and the Vandals come in to make an end for ever of Roman Africa, a series of crises were to bring out very strikingly what a high degree of autonomy Rome could allow in matters of administration and discipline where there was no question of the unity of faith. The history of Pelagius has shown the African bishops turning to Rome once the controversy ceases to be merely local. In this matter where the faith is at stake there is no mention of Milan, the capital, along with Rome. It is to the pope they appeal because " You, from the Apostolic See, speak with greater persuasiveness." And in his reply Innocent r greets them as one episcopate among many who come to drink of the fons apostolicus. "Like yourselves, all bishops, whenever the faith is in question, can do no more than refer it to Peter who is the foundation of all episcopal dignity." Under Innocent's successor, the rash and hasty Zosimus, the rare pope of whom one is tempted to say he must have been a nuisance to all concerned, the loyalty of the Africans was seriously tried. There was, to begin with, his apparent eagerness to reverse his predecessor's judgement on Pelagius; and next, when the firm and dignified protest from Africa halted him, there was a conflict over appeals to Rome which, for its intensity, recalls that of St. Cyprian with St. Stephen I. The African Church by a singular exception to the general practice had ceased to allow appeals to Rome from its final judgements, and even menaced with excommunication whoever pursued such appeals. Zosimus not only ignored this legislation, by receiving and deciding appeals, but sent a commission into Africa itself to examine the facts of the case and to bring the bishops to reverse their policy. How the matter would have developed had he lived it is not easy to say, but he died while the dispute was barely begun and his successor, busy with the anxiety of a disputed election, went no further with it. But six months-after Zosimus' death, the Council of Africa (May 419) published its code and the law forbidding appeals to be taken overseas, with its penalty for disobedience, appeared in its due place. Seven years later the conflict broke out once more, and over the same miserable person whose misdeeds had been the occasion of trouble in 419, the priest Apiarius. Pope Celestine acted just as Zosimus had done. He received the appeal and he sent legates to Carthage. The Bishop of Carthage agreed to reopen the case and then, while the Roman legates were eloquently pleading for Apiarius, the wretched fellow made a clean breast of his crimes. As far as Apiarius was concerned the affair was ended. But not so for the African bishops. They determined that the question of Roman intervention in disciplinary matters should be settled once and for all. Accordingly, the Council of 426 made a formal request to the pope that he would not for the future be so ready to receive appeals, and that he would not receive to communion those excommunicated by the African bishops, and that he would not restore those whom the African bishops had in council deposed; that he would not for the future send any more commissioners into Africa, much less commissioners charged to enlist the services of the police, since nowhere can the bishops find these things are allowed by the synods of the past, nor should the pride of this world find any counterpart in the Church of Christ. To this extraordinary remonstrance the most extraordinary surely it has ever received Rome made no reply. As with the Catholic council of Sardica's attempt to prescribe to Rome the manner in which its primacy should function, so was it with the attempt of these African bishops, equally loyal in faith. Rome made no sign; but in her own time, and as opportunity called for it, she continued to exercise in respect of Africans, as of Gauls, Egyptians and Orientals, all the fullness of her right. The prefecture of Illyricum completes the round of these more distant churches of the West; and here, in the last half of the fourth century Rome, to meet a wholly exceptional difficulty, created a really exceptional regime. The difficulty arose from the transference to the Eastern Empire, by Gratian in 379, of the civil dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia. Henceforward in temporal matters they would be ruled from Constantinople. The popes, however, did not intend that in spiritual matters, too, these churches of what was now called Illyricum Orientale should look to Constantinople; and to counteract any influence tending to draw them thither, the popes established the bishop of the chief see of the prefecture, Thessalonica, as their permanent representative for these provinces. He was charged to supervise the elections of all the bishops and, although the existing system of metropolitans was retained, he was given authority over the metropolitans too. All the business between the different bishops and metropolitans was to pass through him, and his jurisdiction was enlarged to try appeals, with discretion to decide himself what appeals were to go forward to Rome. The Bishop of Thessalonica from the time of Pope Damasus (366-384) is the papal agent, a kind of permanent legate, for these border provinces where Greek and Latin meet, acting, as say the letters of Boniface I, vice sedis apostolicae, vice nostra. Inevitably the system met with opposition. Many of the bishops of Illyricum disliked it, and not least from the barrier it raised against all chance of making an ecclesiastical career via the court at Constantinople. The emperor too, Theodosius II (408-450), showed himself hostile and in 421 a rescript was published attaching the sees of Illyricum to the jurisdiction of Constantinople. The pope, unable or unwilling to make any open reprisal, persuaded the Western Emperor, Honorius (395-423), to intervene with his nephew and, Theodosius giving way, the incident closed. But the ambition of Constantinople persevered, as did also the desire of the Eastern Emperor to see no exception to the rule that all the sees of his empire were grouped around the three great sees of the East, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. The question of the Roman jurisdiction over Illyricum Orientale remained, to be for the next two centuries one of the chronic causes of trouble between West and East.

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SITUATION IN THE FOURTH CENTURY: DIOCLETIAN TO THEODOSIUS, 284-395 CATHOLICISM was not the product of the civilisation in which it first appeared; nor did it draw from that civilisation the strength by which it developed and spread abroad. It could not, in the nature of things, be essentially dependent on that civilisation, but it was immensely conditioned by it in all the circumstances of its growth. The Roman roads, the ease of communication, the internal peace and order secured to a whole world through the single political administration, the common languages, the common cultural idiom of Hellenism, all these undoubtedly helped the early propaganda. With the fortunes of the Roman State those of the new religion were, inevitably, very closely linked indeed. Whatever menaced the one would certainly handicap the other. It so happened that, in little more than two centuries from the first preaching of the Gospel, the political regime we call the Empire was brought to the verge of disruption. The basis of the Empire was military power. The emperor was, in essence, the magistrate to whom the command of the army and dictatorial power were made over for life. Upon the commander-in-chief's hold over the army, therefore, upon the reality of his command, all was based. The senate's delegation of powers, its assent to his nomination were, from the beginning, formalities merely. The real power lay with the army, and increasingly, as the first two centuries went by, it was the man who could manage the army who ruled. Periodically the army got out of hand. Rival armies supported rival claimants to the supreme power, and civil wars had to be fought to settle the issue. There was one such crisis in 68- 69, another in 192-193, and the emperor who emerged victorious from this last, Septimius Severus, summed up for his successors the policy which alone would make the position safe for them, "See that the soldiers have plenty of money. Nothing else matters." In the seventy years that followed the death of this shrewd realist, the weakness inherent in the State's foundations bred all its fullness of destruction. Emperor after emperor was set up by the soldiers, only to be murdered when he ceased to please them, twenty-six emperors in fifty years. One they slew because he proved an incompetent general in the field; another because he strove to restore military discipline; another because, his private fortune exhausted, he ceased to be able to be generous; others again from sheer boredom. In different parts of the empire different armies set up their own emperors, none of them strong enough even to attempt to suppress his rivals, and for the best part of a generation whole provinces were ruled as independent states. Finally, a succession of able soldiers from Illyria (Diocletian and Constantine the chief of them) halted the long anarchy. The State was now reorganised. Every last vestige of the republic was swept away. The emperor was, henceforth, an absolute monarch of the oriental type; and by a careful redistribution of the powers of his subordinates whether generals in the army or governors of provinces and a systematic separation of the civil and military authority throughout the administration, barriers were set against any return of the anarchy. Diocletian recognised, too, how inevitable was the competition for the supreme position, and to guard against this he associated others with himself as joint emperors of the one state. There were two emperors from 285 and four from 293. Even this far reaching change did not immediately succeed. On the retirement of Diocletian and his senior colleague in 306 the new senior looked outside the imperial families for his two new assistants. Whereupon Constantine and Maxentius, the sons of the late emperors, Constantius and Maximian, took up arms, and a new civil war began among the six emperors. It ended in 312 with Constantine master of the West. Eleven years later he had conquered his eastern colleague and was sole lord of the Roman world. He was almost the last to hold that place for any length of time. When he died (337) he left his power by will-betraying thereby an un-Roman conception of political power simply monstrous in its scale to his sons and nephews. Organised murder disposed of the nephews, a civil war of the eldest son (340), and for ten years the dyarchy was restored to the profit of Constans and Constantius II. In 350 Constans was murdered, and three years of war followed between his murderer and his surviving brother. Constantius was in the end victorious and thenceforward, until the one surviving nephew of Constantine rose to contest his supremacy in 360, he ruled alone like his father thirty years before. Death came to him in 361, just in time to prevent a new struggle between himself and Julian his cousin. Julian, in his short reign of twenty months, had no rival nor had his successor Jovian in his still shorter reign. But with the accession, on Jovian's death (364), of Valentinian I, the army insisted on his associating his brother as emperor. Thenceforward, except for a brief three months at the end of the reign of Theodosius I (November, 394-January, 395), no one man ever ruled again the lands of the empire of Augustus. For all who could read, death was written very evidently on the face of the imperial system. It was, indeed, only the chance of the succession of great princes in the second century that had preserved the empire beyond its first hundred years. The empire was a pyramid balanced on its apex and the most marvellous thing about it is that it survived at all. Thanks to Diocletian and to Constantine in the first place, it survived even the wholesale destruction of the third century and, even as a united political system, it was to outlive in the East by many centuries its disappearance from the West. But there was a further fundamental weakness against which even the greatest of emperors could not secure the State weakness of an economic nature. It is one of the capital facts of the situation that the political breakdown and the invasions of the fifth century occurred while an economic revolution was in progress. The world in which the Church was founded and in which it had so far developed, was a world in which the town was all important, and in which the countryside existed only for the sake of the town. It was the towns that were, necessarily, the first centres of the new religion; and the bishops, one in each city, the cells which together made up the Church Universal. By the time of Diocletian's restoration of the Roman State or, to look at it from another point of view, by the time of Constantine's conversion the first beginnings were, however, apparent of a social revolution whose final effect would be to reverse this relation of town and countryside. The towns were already beginning to lose their primacy as social organisms. During the whole of the fourth century the pace of this new development increased rapidly. It was still in its first stage when the mainstay of the town's importance as against the countryside the central imperial government disappeared altogether from the West. Simultaneously with that disappearance there broke over the ill-defended frontiers wave after wave of primitive nomadic peoples bent on plunder; and there also took place, through the so-called barbarian troops of the army, the establishment in Spain, Gaul, and Italy itself, of kingdoms which, theoretically within the empire, were in fact autonomous. In-these momentous years were laid the foundations of that new civilisation in which the Catholic Church was to work for the next eight hundred years. To understand at all what the Church did for that civilisation, to understand how the Church's development was in turn conditioned by it, there must be borne in mind something of its leading characteristics as they differentiate it from the older world in which the Church was founded. The army, at the end of that century whose early years saw Constantine's conversion, still kept the frontier. What of the life within? From about the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (16-1-180) there is observable a slow but unmistakable drift in the economic life of the Roman world, a strong ebb towards a more primitive (or more natural) system. There is a persistent debasement of the coinage (hardly checked until Diocletian). There is that debasement's inevitable effect in a chaotic flux of prices. Money- gold coins which really are gold, silver which really is silver- disappears. All that remains are the copper coins covered with a mere wash of silver, "metal assignats," as Mommsen called them. The State begins to be willing to take its taxes in kind, in goods and services. It even begins to grade and to pay its salaries, too, in kind. The army had always been the empire's greatest burden, and in this third century (Septimius Severus to Diocletian) the army was absolute master, greater than ever, better paid, the empire its prey to be looted at will. The bureaucracy, too, swelled its numbers beyond anything hitherto known. Industries the commercialised industries of modern times-there were none to speak of, none to be a source of wealth to the State. Commerce on the large scale, again hardly existed. The one real source of wealth was land. The chief means, apart from land, open to the man who wished to "invest" money was the letting it out at interest or the farming of taxes. The towns in such a system, were parasites, places where the middlemen lived, markets where they traded, barracks where were housed the soldiers who protected the exploitation. For exploitation was really the ultimate end of the system. The very rich grew richer still, the poor remained poor. The middle class disappeared. Diocletian's success as restorer was, in the economic sphere, inevitably limited. His reforms amounted, often enough, to little more than a legal consecration of existing abuses. He restored the coinage; he simplified, while he extended, the system of imperial taxation; he tried, but failed signally, to stabilise prices by imperial edict; his great feat was to inaugurate a regime in which the whole population of the empire was gradually conscripted and bound down, each class with its descendants for the burden was hereditary to work for the welfare of the State. The taxes are not excessive, the administration is not extravagant. But every possible source of wealth is surveyed and its owner assessed land, cattle, slaves, serfs, peasants and owners too. All are now bound by law to the trade in which they work, and their children are bound to follow them in it civil servants, the artificers in the armament factories and in the textile factories where are made the costumes for the court and the uniforms for the army; the ship owners, millers and bakers on whom the population of the cities depends for its daily food-allowance; the various building crafts and trades; the bath keepers, and by no means least, the army of workmen, keepers, charioteers, gladiators, actors "slaves of the people's pleasure" the law styles them-who produce the public games given now, at Rome, on 175 days of the year. The free farmer, the colonus, is likewise bound to the land. The owner cannot dispossess this class of tenant. If he sells the land the coloni go with it. It is to the land, rather than to the owner, that the new regime enslaves them. The free peasants of the villages are likewise bound to their village. No man shall escape his due share of the great burden. Nor is this a matter that affects only the trader and the working class. For there is yet another conscription of the time and brains of the more leisured class to the service of the city where they live. The Roman civitas is more than a town. It is the town and the hinterland of countryside, often very extensive, upon which the town lives. It is a thing founded for the purpose of exploiting that countryside. It has its "constitution," its senate and its magistrates. It is a tiny State in itself, with considerable autonomy, and from this point of view it is not incorrect to describe the empire as a federation of self-governing municipalities. For the senate and the high offices there is a considerable property qualification. It is the local aristocracy who rule, and amongst whom the honours, the titles, the social consideration of high office are shared. This cursus honorum entails expense on whoever proceeds through it, expense which is ever increasing. Moreover, the class from which the office-holders are drawn is made responsible for the taxation. In case of deficit or maladministration this class, as a class, is liable. Whence supervision from- the central government and, often enough, an endeavour to escape from the burden of one's rank. Whence conscription here too, and a conscription which, once more, is hereditary. The man born a curialis cannot escape his destiny of ruling the civitas and of being responsible to the State for the quota it should contribute to the imperial revenue. One way out there did remain a way only the very wealthiest could take. This was to buy rank as an honorary member of the Roman senate itself. It was a way all who could ultimately went, and these last two centuries of the Empire in the West saw a steady flight of these clarissimi viri from the towns to their country estates. The towns, then, slowly shrank. They became once again mere centres for bargaining, and for the offices of what local government still went on. The great landed estate, on the other hand, gained a new importance. It was a fiscal unit independent of the civitas and gradually it became, under the protection of its privileged owner, an asylum for all who fled the heavy burden of the urban regime, for the impoverished curialis and the harassed artificer alike. Economically the landed estate had always been self-sufficient. Now it slowly began to acquire a political self- sufficiency too. The owner gradually began to exercise judicial authority over those who lived on his land, settling their disputes, punishing their misdoings. He had his prison. He had his armed guards. The emperors protested and legislated, but in vain. Nor was it merely in an accidental fashion that one wealthier private citizen thus became the master of his co-citizens, and his private will more powerful in their lives than the law. Already, from the beginning of the fourth century, the weaker man had begun consciously and deliberately to surrender himself to the more powerful, the poorer man to the richer, for the sake of the influential patronage he thereby gained. This is the patrocinium and here, too, the emperors legislated in a contrary sense and here, too, they legislated in vain. Here, very notably, the coming "invasion" will wear down to nothing the check of their government. The federation of self-governing municipalities is, throughout the later fourth century, steadily losing its importance. More and more there is beginning to count this new arrangement of patron and client we cannot yet say overlord and vassal and the empire in the West is beginning to be a mass of such private associations, based on ownership of land, associations not yet legal, a mass held together by one thing only, the fact itself steadily less and less of a reality that all these inhabitants are citizens of the one state that the central government protects. That central government is, too, the last support of the importance of the towns, and with the fifth century it is to disappear. During these centuries of the steady decay of the imperial regime, of alternate chaos and temporary restoration, the Catholic Church has steadily grown and developed. It is the one institution that escapes the universal mortification, the one living free thing amid the new all-embracing mechanical despotism. Here alone does the tradition of individual initiative continue, of spiritual liberty, of social activity. Here alone do men continue to govern themselves, to find an escape from the paralysis to which, ultimately, the over-governed succumb. Popular life can, here, still find corporate expression; personality, stifled elsewhere, save in the army, can flourish. It is no matter for surprise that the best thought of the time is within the Church, that it is the Church alone which continues to breed thinkers and orators and rulers. The only live literature of this dull stagnant time is ecclesiastical, and inevitably the bishop's power and prestige increase enormously. He is indeed, in the city, the "one power capable of counterbalancing and resisting the all-pervading tyranny of the imperial bureaucracy." When that bureaucracy disappears what will be left to rival his place? Moreover, the possession of land is, in this new regime, to be the all- important, determining factor of political importance. The owner of land is to be ruler. In the coming age the Church is to be one of the greatest landowners of all. For in the new system of a rural economy the abbeys are to be, in the flourishing countrysides, what the bishops continue to be in the diminished towns.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES DURING THE FIFTH CENTURY, 395-526 The Empire which, at the time of Constantine's conversion, had thus, for a good hundred and fifty years already, suffered the continuous strain of these internal weaknesses, had during the same time been obliged to face the menace of troubles no less serious from beyond its frontier the menace of the "Barbarians." These were the people who dwelt beyond the frontier Picts to the north of Hadrian's wall in Britain, Goths, Franks, Alamans and other tribes of Germanic race to the east of the Rhine and the north of the Danube, Moors and Nubians to the south of Roman Africa. They were pastoral and agricultural peoples, living on the produce of their lands, civilized in various degrees, with a primitive and fluctuating political system and an equally primitive social organisation. For those among them who lived near to the frontier, the life within the empire was a source of perpetual attraction, partly from the comfort its superior material civilisation promised, partly from the greater security and protection of its more settled organisation. For these pastoral Barbarians were, and had been for centuries, at the mercy of peoples still more primitive, the hordes of fierce nomads whose sphere of operation was the vast continent that stretches from the Carpathians across the steppes of Russia beyond the Urals and the Caspian Sea as far as the very wall of China, a world of savage plunderers and destroyers never at rest, yellow-skinned non-Aryan peoples, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Tartars, Mongols, Turks. Against these the pastoral tribes had no defence. The organised might of the Roman world, its guarded frontier, its settled towns promised them security; and from a very early time they sought to enter it. From the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180) the defence of the long northern frontier was the chief anxiety of the State, the final reason for the army's domination of its life, political and economic. This anxiety was, in the later empire the empire of the third and fourth centuries enormously increased by the new developments within the army itself. In the first place the tactics, strategy and system of fortification were so altered by the necessity of this frontier warfare that the army almost disappeared as a mobile thing, before the demands made on it to provide the innumerable garrisons of the new system. It was indeed a serious development that the time had now come when it was hardly possible to put 10,000 troops in the field, for all that the army numbered half a million. But far more serious was the fact that the army had really ceased to be Roman at all. Since Septimius Severus (193-211) it had been more and more recruited from the Barbarians themselves. By the time of Valentinian I (364- 375) it was entirely Barbarian. The words "soldier" and "Barbarian" were henceforward synonymous. It was a still graver development that the command, too, had ceased to be Roman. In the third century (Gallienus 253-268) the Roman senator and his class had been debarred from the command. The exclusion had then been extended to the provincial aristocracy, both the senatorial and that of the curiales. Already in the time of Constantine's father the officers of this almost Barbarian army were of the lowest ranks of provincial citizens. By the time of Constantine's death (337) they had ceased to be Roman at all. The army was, henceforth, a wholly Barbarian thing, officered by Barbarians, armed as the Barbarians were armed, using their methods as it used their weapons, even beginning to be clad in the once-despised Barbarian dress. Constantine favoured Franks; Theodosius Goths. Vandals and Alans, too, were to be found, and in the very highest posts. As in the third century the low class of officer had produced, inevitably, a low class of emperor in this state where the soldier was ruler, so now the Barbarian-held command brought the supreme posts of the empire within the Barbarians' grasp. No Barbarian, it is true, ever took for himself the imperial crown, but the daughters of Barbarians married the sons of emperors and Theodosius the Great's own grandson was thus half Barbarian in blood. In addition to the now Barbarianised " regular " army, the empire disposed also of the troops of its allies, the Foederati. These were groups, tribes, "nations" of Barbarians, admitted within the Empire, granted lands on which to live, and giving in return military service. Such a nation were the Goths, settled on the Danube by Valens in 376. These Foederati kept all their national organisation, including their king, and their own laws. As it suited the imperial policy, or as their kings were able to exact the concession, they moved about within the empire for the empire's service. The difference between the western empire in the fourth and in the fifth centuries is the difference between the first and second stage of a continuous development. In the fifth century that empire as a political unity disappears, but the disappearance is not due to revolution nor to conquest by foreign peoples. It is the term of the previous development a development whose pace has been accidentally quickened by unforeseen events, and which has of course been conditioned in its detail by the chance of the particular personalities engaged in it. The emperor has steadily ceased to count. The sixty years which followed the death of Theodosius the Great saw in succession two crowned weaklings his son, Honorius (395-423) and his grandson, Valentinian III (423-455) inert, incompetent princes who lived in an orientalised retirement at Ravenna while mightier forces decided the fate of their world. The Barbarian elements, already present in overwhelming force in the army of the fourth century had come, in the fifth century, to dominate it entirely and to dominate the court too. Between these Barbarians and what remained of Rome in the high places of the State, the rivalry was continuous. Ravenna is a court of endless intrigue. More than once the all-powerful subject is murdered: Stilicho, a Barbarian, by the order of Honorius; Aetius, the last great man of the Roman line, by Valentinian III a miserable debauchee who recalls the last of the Valois. In the next stage (455-476) the Barbarian is more powerful still. He murders Valentinian, the last of the line of Theodosius, and for the next twenty-one years sets up and dethrones and sets up again as emperor whoever seems most likely to play the part as he desires. For a short period there is no emperor at all. The Barbarian has not thought it worth while to nominate one. Finally, in 476, the Barbarian decides that the institution may just as well end. He orders the child who holds the title Romulus, whom in a kind of appropriate mockery men called Augustulus to resign, and he sends the insignia of the office to the emperor at Constantinople. No more emperors are needed in the West. The Barbarian will continue to rule as for the last fifty years, to rule nominally in the name of the remaining eastern emperor as, for those fifty years, he had ruled through his western colleague. This period of the passing of the emperors was marked by the most serious breakdown of the frontier yet known, when hordes of the fiercer Barbarian nomads poured into Gaul and Spain and, unhindered, ravaged and plundered for the best part of two years (407-409). From the anarchy of those years the imperial hold on these provinces never really recovered. It was now that the kings of the Barbarian foederati, thanks to accidental combinations of favourable circumstances the emperor's weakness, the unstable position of his Barbarian ministers, the jealousies of the court, and the scale of this unprecedented invasion were able to wrest unheard-of concessions, and so to achieve the beginnings of real independent political power. To dislodge the marauding hordes the government at Ravenna could do no better than despatch into Gaul the nation of the Visigoths who, since the death of Theodosius in 395, had been a continual embarrassment. Their king, Alaric, had turned against the eastern emperor in whose territories this people was first settled, and, disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he had then for two years (406-408) ravaged Macedonia and Greece as far as the Peloponnesus. Next, as the price of peace, he was named commander- in-chief of Illyricum the key province where the two empires met. He used his position to attempt to dislodge his enemy the Vandal, Stilicho, then supreme at the western court. But Stilicho was too much for him, and Alaric's invasion of Italy from Illyricum was turned back. Stilicho's murder in 408 left the road open, and after an attempt to wring from the western emperor a concession of rank and a commission Alaric and his people swept down upon Italy as far as Rome, which in 410 fell to them. Alaric died shortly after, as he was preparing to cross from Sicily to Africa, and his nation was still in southern Italy when it was "commissioned" to serve in Gaul and Spain to deal with the remnants of the great invasion of 407-409. In southern Gaul the fighting went on in a haphazard, Barbarian fashion for another ten years, Visigoths as foederati in the service of Honorius fighting first against Alans, Suevi and Vandals, and then against the emperor's own Barbarian army under Constantius. The new feature of this war was that it ended in the establishment of the Visigothic king as the emperor's representative in the lands where he had defeated the empire's invaders. The first of the Barbarian kingdoms was thus founded, Toulouse its capital. The Visigothic king at Toulouse was not independent of the emperor. The cession involved no revolution in law or administration, no wholesale change in ownership. It was not in any sense a conquest. The king of a Barbarian allied nation was now the supreme authority, under the empire, in territory governed for the empire until now by imperial officials. The emperor's hold on these provinces through these officials had been lessening steadily before the change. With the change it shrank to a mere formality. Everything was still done in the emperor's name, but it was the new king's will that settled what should be done. For his own nation he was, as he had always been, master so far as their own law made him so. For the Roman population his rule was exercised through the Roman law and the courts and administrative service which, in the main, the Romans still manned. It cannot be too often emphasised that, in the establishment of these kingdoms, no political revolution was involved. What did accompany them was a wholesale material destruction, towns sacked and burnt, countrysides ravaged. The material organisation by which the ordered central government lived means of communication for example suffered too. And, the most important point of all, the substitution of Barbarian kings for the centralised rule of the Respublica Romana aided most powerfully that social revolution already in progress by which one class of citizens was becoming the master, the political and juridical lord, of another, and in which ownership of land and political authority were becoming fast associated. This revolution, under the new regime, proceeded, one may say in very general terms, with the positive assistance of the rulers. The Barbarian kingdoms of this kind, ultimately established within the limits of the Roman Empire of the West, were five in all the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul; the Burgundians, from 443, in the valley of the Rhone and the lands between the Rhone and Italy; the Vandals in Africa from 430; the Franks in northern and western Gaul from 486; and the Ostrogoths in Italy from 493.

THE CHURCHES OF THE WEST DURING THE CRISIS SPAIN, AFRICA, GAUL The transformation of Western Europe in the course of the fifth century was by no means a uniform affair. The Barbarians were not all equally Barbarian. The mode of their establishment differed very greatly, and since the degree of the Catholic conquest, before the upheaval, also differed from province to province, the effect of the transformation was as varied in the religious world as in the political. Two questions naturally arise: the effect upon the papal centralising policy of this violent disintegration of political life; and its effect on the Catholic establishment in the several provinces, in Spain, Africa, Gaul, and Italy. Spain had suffered greatly in this century of change. There were the invasions of 407-409, then the long war of Visigoths against Vandals, and Suevi. The Vandals soon passed into Africa, but the Suevi remained, established in Portugal and Galicia, to carry on for the next eighty years a sporadic warfare with the Visigoths. Almost the only incident of the religious history of which any record remains, is the intervention of the pope St. Leo I in the controversy over Priscillian. Not all the losses of the upheaval had diminished that fierce animosity, and at the very beginning of St. Leo's pontificate, in the years 444-447, Turribius Bishop of Astorga in Galicia sent to Rome a kind of memorandum explaining that Priscillianism was by no means dead, that it numbered even bishops among its supporters, and asking the aid of the Roman See. St. Leo, in his reply, refers to the difficulty of communication with this distant country since the breakdown of the imperial system. There is no authority to enforce the old anti- Priscillianist legislation so useful a complement, with its heavy sanctions, to the Church's clemency synods are no longer held and therefore the heresy has a new lease of life. To sift out the hidden Priscillianists from the hierarchy, the pope sends a syllabus condemning in sixteen propositions the chief doctrines of the sect, and, his only means of intervening, he suggests that a general council of the bishops of Spain be summoned and the syllabus proposed for their signature. Those who refuse to sign are to be excommunicated. If it is not possible to summon a general council the bishops of Galicia, at any rate, should meet. Neither council could meet. Instead a formulary was drafted and sent to all the bishops. They signed without an exception: more than one, however, with strong reservations. There, apparently, the matter ended. The pope could advise, could command, but in the circumstances of the time, he must leave the execution of his decision to the local council and if this council could not meet the trouble must endure. Apart from this incident we know little until, seventy years later, there is record of yet another Roman intervention. Spain had, for the time, passed under the rule of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the Barbarian king who from Ravenna had ruled Italy since 493. In a sense Spain and Italy were, for a moment, reunited. The years of Theodoric's rule were years of peace, and it is perhaps to a new facility of communications that we owe the appeal of the Bishop of Ilice to Pope Hormisdas in 517. It was for a decision in disciplinary matters that Rome was approached. There was the question of communion with what Greek clergy came to Spain, for the sees of the East had been in schism for now thirty years and more. There was, too, the eternal question as to the lawfulness of episcopal elections, the ever-increasing complaint of simoniac prelates. Hormisdas replied by letters for all the bishops of Spain. The old laws governing elections were recalled, the sanctions against simony re-enacted. Provincial synods were to be held annually, and to provide for the execution of the reforms the pope named the Bishop of Astorga his vicar. As to the Greeks, they were to be received only on condition that they signed the formulary which the pope sent with his letters. The Vandal kingdom in Africa was exceptional in its relation to the empire for it was definitely the result of conquest, and the Vandals henceforward continued to be actively hostile to the empire now ruled from Ravenna. The Vandals first came into the empire as a body in the great invasion of 407, and not for nearly a century did they lose their original character of ferocious marauders. From Gaul they passed to the south of Spain, where the province of Andalusia to this day preserves in its name their memory. Thence they crossed the narrow strait into the Roman Mauritania and, at the invitation of its governor, into Africa itself, as his allies in a revolt against the central government. They occupied Africa by conquest, with pitched battles and regular sieges, sacking and pillaging as they went. It was while they were besieging his city of Hippo that St. Augustine, in 430, sickened and died. The fruits of this conquest the government of Ravenna confirmed to the Vandals in a whole series of treaties. The great man of the movement was their king, Genseric, under whom they not only conquered Africa but, taking to the sea, became for half a century the terror of the Mediterranean. Political intrigue had brought them into Africa, and it invited Genseric to Italy too where, in 455, he sacked the ancient capital and carried off into captivity, in true Barbarian fashion, the widow and daughters of the recently murdered Valentinian III. One of these girls was married to a Vandal, and it is with the last of the Vandal kings of Africa that the race of Theodosius finally disappears from history. The kingdom was exceptional, too, in that the Vandals, alone of these Arian barbarian rulers, were bitter persecutors, and under their rule a last chapter was added to the African Church's martyrology. The Vandals brought with them into Africa an organised clergy, and soon there began what was, to all intents and purposes, a war of Arian revenge on Catholicism. The churches were burnt, all assemblies of Catholics forbidden, the bishops and priests rounded up and deported. After twenty years of this the emperor, Valentinian III, intervened and Genseric answered his pleas to the extent of allowing a Catholic bishop at Carthage. This bishop died in 457 two years after Valentinian's murder, at the opening of the last twenty years of the imperial regime and Genseric reverted to the policy of repression. It was forbidden to elect a new bishop and for another twenty years the persecution resumed its way. The administrative system had remained unchanged since the days of the Roman governors, and its personnel was still Roman and therefore Catholic. Whence an active Arian propaganda among the official classes and, from the refusals, numerous martyrdoms. Genseric died, after a reign of fifty years, in 477 and was succeeded by a still more fanatical Arian, Huneric. The new king set himself to exterminate Catholicism within a given time. A great congress of Catholic bishops was summoned they still numbered as many as 466 and on their refusal to be convinced by their Arian rivals, the king announced that the full Roman law against heretics would now be applied against the Catholics, who were given four months in which to apostatize. The bishops were exiled, some to Corsica where they were set to work in the forests, others to the interior of Africa. The laity found every profession and every trade closed against them unless they could produce a certificate of conformity. There were numerous apostasies, numerous forced baptisms. There were also many martyrs, who died in terrible tortures. Within the year the persecutor was dead, putrefactus et ebulliens vermibus, but the work of extermination continued. The pope, Felix III, and the emperor, Zeno excommunicated through the Acacian schism both intervened, pleading for a mitigation of the terror, but in vain. Meanwhile, within African Catholicism chaos reigned. There were no bishops, no churches, hardly any priests, apostates of all degrees, and in 487 the pope, in a council at Rome, drafted a series of rules to regulate the reconciliation of the apostates. That same year the persecution began to slacken. Once again a bishop was allowed in Carthage and then, in 494, other bishops were recalled from exile and their churches restored to them. In the provinces where the Arians were fewest, there was a kind of peace. Elsewhere the old law of repression was maintained in force. The peace, such as it was, lasted but a short time. With the accession of Trasimund (500) the bishops were once more deported this time to Sardinia. Among them was the most distinguished Latin theologian of the century, St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe. For the quarter of a century during which Trasimund reigned the persecution continued and then, with the accession of Hilderic in 523,-it ceased as suddenly as it had begun. This king was the son of the savage Huneric by his marriage with the captive daughter of Valentinian III. In him the line of Theodosius the Great plays its last part in history. He recalled the bishops, restored the churches, allowed all the vacant sees to be filled. For the first time in almost a hundred years African Catholicism knew the peace of ordinary life. In that hundred years Mauritania, the most westerly province had been abandoned to the native tribes; the Moors had occupied Numidia, and from Zeugitana the Church had disappeared entirely. The Vandal kings ruled over an Africa that had shrunk very considerably by comparison with the Africa they had conquered in the last days of St. Augustine's life. Hilderic, by blood half Roman and the last descendant of the old imperial family, pro-Catholic in his religious sympathies, in friendly relation with the reigning Roman Emperor, Justinian, was too novel a type to win much sympathy from his Vandal nobility. That he was not a soldier increased their hostility, and in 532 a revolt broke out headed by the heir to the throne. Hilderic was captured and dethroned and thereupon Justinian braving the warnings of counsellors who recalled the disastrous defeat at sea of the last Roman force that had ventured itself against these barbarians intervened with a fleet and an army. Hilderic and his friends were promptly massacred and then, on the 14th September, the imperial general Belisarius laid hold of Carthage. His victory was the beginning of the end of the Vandal regime. With ease, almost, in the next few years he subdued one district after another and by 539 Africa as much as the Vandals had managed to keep of it was reunited to the empire. The empire's religion was Catholicism and it was now the Arians who were persecuted as heretics. The Church in Gaul, at the moment when the upheaval of the fifth century began, had just lost its first great historical figure. This was St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, who died in 397 and whose work was the foundation upon which all the later structure of French Catholicism was built, for it was St. Martin who first systematically undertook to convert the pagan countryside. He was not himself a native of Gaul but was born in Pannonia, about the time of Constantine's conversion. His father was a soldier and a successful one and this determined the saint's early career. He, too, though much against his will, must be a soldier. His first preference, for a life of prayer and solitude, survived his military life, however, and a meeting with St. Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, led to his establishment as a solitary in the wild and inaccessible retreat of Marmoutier, on the Loire, nor far from Poitiers itself. Disciples gathered round him and here, between 360 and 375, there was formed the first monastic settlement of the Western Church. Like the monks of the earliest Eastern groups, these disciples of St. Martin lived as solitaries, coming together for certain common exercises of piety, and practising heroic austerities. Unlike their Eastern models they lived in the midst of a population wholly Pagan and, inevitably, they added to their monastic occupations the work of their neighbours' conversion. Sermons, instructions, the exposure of the foolishness of the rustic Paganism, the practical exercise of the charity of Christ, the example of their own heroic virtue began gradually to tell. By the time of St. Hilary's death much had been accomplished and more still when, eight years later, the clergy of Tours came to announce to Martin that he was their new bishop. His elevation was for the saint simply an occasion of extending the scope of the work to which he had given himself. He established a new monastery at Tours and, dressed in the same simple costume, he continued as a bishop to live with the same austere simplicity to achieve which he had left the world thirty years before. Long before he died he was the greatest force in the Church of Gaul. Everywhere in the West his monks were sought as bishops. From his death (397) his tomb at Tours became the goal of innumerable pilgrimages, the scene of many miracles, and to Martin were speedily paid the same liturgical honours which, for a long time now, it had been customary to pay to the martyrs. He is the first holy man not a martyr to be regarded officially, as we say now, as a saint. The west of Gaul had been the field of Martin's apostolate. In the generation that followed his death a new centre of similar work, also monastic, arose in the south. This was the settlement on the island of Lerins, off the coast of Province. The monks, here also, lived a life that followed Eastern fashions, a combination of the solitary and the cenobite, an austerity in the matter of abstinences that verged on the heroic, with an attachment to the practice of manual labour and, also, a devotion to the study of Sacred Scripture. In the first quarter of the fifth century, as the range of the central power began to shrink, Treves had lost its civil importance; it was Arles that was now the chief town of Roman Gaul. To the west of it the Visigoths were established, with Toulouse as their chief centre. To the east the Burgundians would soon be ceded a similar settlement. But for yet another fifty years or so, the centre of Gaul with Arles for its capital would continue to be occupied by armies and officials obedient to the, by now, distant emperors in Ravenna. Something of the ecclesiastical history of Arles we have seen in Pope Zosimus' exaltation of its bishop as a kind of papal vicar with authority over all the other metropolitans and in the speedy revocation of this novelty by Pope Boniface I. The bishop for whom it had been created, Patroclus, survived by just five years the death of the Emperor Constantius III, whose favour had been the true cause of his temporary greatness. To succeed Patroclus the Church of Arles called in Lerins, electing as bishop the founder of that holy place, Honoratus (426). He reigned, however, for two years only and in his place yet another monk of Lerins was chosen Hilary. St. Hilary of Arles showed himself a true bishop. He continued his life of mortification. He gave himself to preaching and to the conversion of the countryside, to the correction of his clergy and of his suffragans, and to providing good bishops very often from Lerins as the sees fell vacant. Like every reformer he made enemies, and these appealed complainingly to Rome. Finally, his zeal to correct abuses took him into territories beyond his metropolitan jurisdiction. He was found arranging episcopal successions as far away as Besancon and that before the bishop, Celidonius, was really dead. When the bishop recovered and found that, during his illness, St. Hilary had consecrated a good man to take his place there was more than a little trouble. St. Hilary then took it upon himself to summon a council and depose Celidonius. Celidonius had in his time served the emperor as a judge. The death sentences he had passed on criminals were, it was now said, an obstacle lo his consecration. Again, he had been married and, it was said, he had married a widow. This again made his consecration irregular. Celidonius appealed to Rome (444) and went there in person to see the case through. St. Hilary followed, actually to lecture the pope on the facility with which he listened to complaints from the disaffected and disobedient and then, in his simplicity, to depart with the appeal still pending, in what looked very like flagrant contempt. the trial finished. Celidonius cleared himself. Then the storm broke over the unlucky Bishop of Arles. The pope, unfortunately for Hilary, was St. Leo the Great. Celidonius he reinstated, and in a letter to the bishops of the province he denounced the usurpation of the Bishop of Arles unsparingly. As a punishment he stripped him of all his rights as metropolitan, attaching his province to the see of Vienne and only allowing him to retain his own see as a special act of grace. It was an execution with the full rigour of the law, nor, despite St. Hilary's endeavours, did the pope relent. After St. Hilary's death (448) a new division of provinces was indeed made, and Arles recovered its rank as a metropolitan see, but for as long as St. Hilary lived he was a living witness of the reality of Rome's superior jurisdiction (as was to be, a few years later, a much greater than he, the Patriarch of Alexandria) and of the West's unquestioning acceptance of it. The year that saw the death of St. Leo (461) saw also the murder of the last emperor to matter in the West Maiorian. He was also the first emperor for nearly a century to show himself in Gaul. Three years later the death of the patrician Aegidius removed the last Roman general who remained in touch with Ravenna. The last days, the last hours of the Roman rule were approaching. The Visigoths at Toulouse knew it well and, abandoning the fiction of their status as the emperor's men defending a menaced province, they set themselves to capture what they could of the now deserted centre of Gaul. One by one the great cities were attacked and fell to them, the inhabitants sometimes resisting not unsuccessfully until orders came from the emperor to surrender. He had found it more convenient to arrange with the enemy. Of the life, ecclesiastical as well as civil, of this unhappy time, we possess a by no means inconsiderable memorial in the work of St. Sidonius Apollinaris. He was himself of Lyons, sprung from a family of senatorial rank. His wife's father Avitus-was for a brief moment emperor, and Sidonius climbed the cursus honorum to its heights, becoming Prefect of Rome in 468. He returned to Gaul and in 470 was elected Bishop of the Auvergne. It needs no great effort to believe how greatly this was against the wishes of this cultured, leisurely aristocrat upon whom, now, the end of all things seemed come. The Visigoths were attacking. He was isolated from Ravenna, even had Ravenna been disposed to help him. He rallied the city to defend itself and resisted stoutly. In 475, however, the end came. The empire it was almost its last act ceded the city to Euric the Visigothic king. The bishop was carried off a prisoner to Toulouse. From his letters written during this time we learn much of the " Barbarians " amongst other things that their Arianism seems to have sharpened with the new spirit of conquest, and that the king had found means to prevent the election of bishops to many of the sees. Two years later Sidonius was allowed to return. Euric had no longer any anxiety that the ex-emperor's son-in-law, the one-time prefect of Rome, might combine with Ravenna against him. Since 476 the emperors had gone. At Ravenna, too. the Barbarian now ruled openly. During these twenty years that lie between the deaths of St. Leo and of St. Sidonius (461-479) the council of bishops continued to meet, irregularly, haltingly, in a kind of ever feebler decrescendo. The Visigothic advance toward the east, and the Burgundian advance down the valley of the Rhone slowly set up a new barrier against communications with Italy. The action of the Papacy on these now distant churches is felt more and more rarely. To the north of the new Visigothic conquests, however, all isolated Roman army still maintained itself: Its leader was Syagrius whom the Barbarians called "the King of the Romans." He was the son of that Aegidius who died in 464, and he too was about to disappear. The conquerors of Syagrius were not, however, the hitherto invincible Visigoths. They were the Franks, associated with the empire for two centuries, now as -foes and now as foederati, and settled under their several kings (for they lacked the unity of the Visigoths) on the lower Rhine since the time of Constantine's rather, Constantius I (293-306). The Franks were, of all the foederati, the least civilised. There was still about them a crude brutal bloodthirstiness that had long disappeared from the Goths and the Burgundians, and, another mark of the small effect of their long contact with the empire, they were still pagans. The final stage in their history, in which they, too, begin to occupy the territory of the empire as rulers really independent, begins with the succession of Clovis as king of the Franks centred round Tournai. This was in 481. Five years later he had overcome Syagrius and was master of the north of Gaul as far as the Loire. He then turned on the Alamans whom he drove back across the Rhine, and upon the other kings of his own nation whom he also defeated and slew. In 493 he married, and his wife, a Burgundian, was a Catholic. Three years later he himself became a Catholic and was baptised at Rheims by the bishop, St. Remy. Thousands of his warriors followed his example. The stupendous importance of this conversion to all the succeeding history of the Church is one of the commonplaces of history. At the moment when it took place not one of the princes who ruled what had been, and what still was, the Roman Empire was a Catholic. The remaining emperor, Anastasius, was a Monophysite and his Catholic subjects were cut off from the head of the Church by the Acacian Schism. The new Barbarian rulers of the West, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Vandals were, all of them, Arians. That the new conqueror of the north should prefer to be Catholic was the first break in a century of steady loss, the first sign of Catholicism's future grip on the public life of the new Western world. Its effect upon the future of the Franks was not less momentous. In their case, and in their case alone, there was not between the civilised subjects and the Barbarian ruler the greatest of all barriers, namely, that the one was Catholic and the other anti- Catholic. Here alone was the fusion of Roman and Barbarian possible from the very beginning, and it began from the very moment of the baptism. The bishops, who, when the chaos of the change had passed, were everywhere revealed as the only leaders of what still endured, were, in the kingdom where the Catholic Franks ruled, not merely neutral spectators of the new order but its most active supporters. Alone of these Barbarian kingdoms the kingdom of the Franks survived, and it gave their name to the vast Roman territory where they established it. The Vandals in Africa lasted until 534, the Ostrogoths in Italy till 554, the Visigoths in Spain until 711. But under the Franks, Gaul became France, the fruit of the union between Frank and Gallo-Roman based on their common acceptance of the Catholic Faith. Gibbon was right when he spoke of the French monarchy as founded on the Catholic bishops.

THE ROMAN SEE AND ITALY St. Leo, pope from 440 to- 461, is the first of the three popes who alone of the long line are popularly styled "the Great." He was not Roman by birth, but from an early age he was one of the Roman clergy. He rose to be one of the seven deacons, and he was by 430 sufficiently important for St. Cyril of Alexandria to enlist his support against Nestorius. He was the friend also of Cassian, and with Cassian he assisted Celestine I in the Nestorian trouble. So, too, a few years later, it was his advice that guided Sixtus III in the final despatch of Julian of Eclanum. The imperial court, also, realised his worth and made use of his diplomatic talents. He was, in fact, acting as its ambassador in Gaul when, Sixtus III dying (August, 440), he was elected pope. As pope he was destined to fulfil all his early promise, to be, above all, the firm administrator and ruler, the touch of whose hands of steel an apostolic diplomacy kept ever from harshness. To this invaluable asset of a truly Roman spirit informed by the charity of the Gospel, St. Leo added intellectual attainments of a very high order. He was master of a singularly beautiful Latinity, clear, simple, and strong as his own disposition, and he was that rare thing among popes, a constructive theologian. He is almost the last pope to use as his mother tongue the Latin of classical antiquity, and the only pope to add his personal quota to the corpus of early Catholic theology. With St. Leo the golden age of the fathers reaches its term. His theological competence found full scope in the controversy as to the relations of the human and the divine in Our Lord which, twenty years after Nestorius, still divided the East, and which issued, in St. Leo's time, in the two great opposing councils at Ephesus (the Latrociniunm and at Chalcedon (431 and 451). The West knew the pope rather as an administrator and, in the domain of faith, as the most brilliant exponent so far of the prerogatives o f his primatial see. How he exercised that superior authority in the distant churches of Gaul and Spain has already been noted. He was equally active in what provinces of the diocese of Africa remained to the empire. From the most of them he was cut off once the anti-Catholic Vandals were possessed of them, but for fifteen years yet western Numidia and Mauretania Cesariensis escaped Genseric; and during that time St. Leo's intervention, in the traditional manner, is constant. He had heard of disorders in the matter of episcopal elections and in a letter to the hierarchy of the province of Mauretania he commissioned the bishop, Potentius, to enquire into the matter in his name. The enquiry proved the accusations true. Men had been consecrated who were the husbands of widows, or who had themselves been twice married. Others again had been elected who were not already clerics. St. Leo acted with moderation. Except for the bigamists (in the canonical sense) he would overlook what had been done, confirming these irregularly elected bishops but insisting that the law must be observed for the future. A convert Donatist bishop for from the moment of the Vandal invasion the penal code against the sect was no longer enforced and it revived in more than one place he allowed to keep his rank and authority over his people converted with him. Other cases he left to the judgement of the local bishops. Finally he directed that, for the future, care should be taken not to create sees outside the cities. To set up bishops in the villages would bring the episcopate to ridicule. To appreciate as it deserves the record of St. Leo's intervention in Africa, we need to recall the relations between the African bishops and Rome twenty years earlier, in the days when St. Leo was still but a deacon of the apostolic see. The pope makes no apology for his intervention, nor does he seem to think the occasion has come for any comment on the anti-Roman legislation of the famous Council of 427. Nor does he propose himself as the obvious substitute for that great annual council whose operation the invasions have so rudely interrupted. Like his predecessors before him, he makes the fact of his holding the Roman See the sole reason for all he says and does, in Africa as elsewhere. All that the Africans in 426 had protested the pope must not do hear appeals from Africa, send legates into Africa to hold enquiries and execute his judgements St. Leo, twenty years later, continues to do, and this as simply as though none had ever questioned these rights of his see. He was of course fully aware of the delicate susceptibilities of these African bishops and, if he was resolute in his practical affirmation of the rights of Rome, he could, on occasion, study their sensibilities. So it was, for example, in the case of the bishop Lupicinus who had appealed to him from their excommunication, and whose case he sent back to them to be re-tried. Nevertheless the pope desires that in all future cases where there is question of litigation between the bishops, a full report shall be sent to him of the matters in dispute and the solution arrived at, so that it may be strengthened by his sentence too. St. Leo was the pope in whose time fell Attila's invasion of Italy and Genseric's descent on Rome. Tradition describes him as warding off the first from the threatened city by the sheer might of his own holy personality, and history records how he persuaded Genseric to retire with what booty he cared to take. The saintly pope is already creating the role in which the medieval bishop was so often to figure, the protector of his people in temporals no less than in spirituals. In the affair of the Manichees the one domestic event of his reign known to us in any detail it may be conceived that he protected them in both. It was the fate of Manicheeism to be universally persecuted. On account of the moral aberrations it harboured and encouraged, it was proscribed by pagan emperors like Diocletian, by Buddhists in India and China, and of course by Catholic princes too. Already before the conversion of Constantine, Manicheeism was reduced, in the Roman Empire, to the condition of a secret society. From time to time there were arrests, trials, and revelations of disgusting moral disorder. Rome was the scene of such an exposure in 443. The ancient capital had been for some years a natural place of refuge for the Africans in flight from the Vandal invasion. They brought with them a proportion of Manichees, to swell the ranks of the existing organisation in Rome. The expansion of the sect did not escape St. Leo. He brought the matter to the notice of the civil authority and soon, at Rome, too, there were arrests and trials and revelations. Those proved guilty were condemned to life imprisonment. St. Leo did more. He circularised the bishops of Italy, communicating the official reports of the trials and bidding them guard their people from the new contamination. The emperor, Valentinian III, on his side, renewed the law of his pagan predecessor, but, it is interesting to note, he did not renew the penalty of death by fire there enacted. Rome itself was by the time of the death of St. Leo (November 11, 461) a Catholic city at last. All that was left of the old religion were the temples, unoccupied, empty, falling slowly into ruin (for as yet none had been consecrated to Catholic uses), and the social habits of such feasts as the Lupercalia. It was Gelasius I (492-496) who finally brought about their suppression. Year by year the churches increased in number, and around them a first beginning of the system of parishes. The dissident heretics who, in one degree or another, had troubled the unity of the Roman church for two centuries were gone, Donatists, Novatians, Manichees and their "Bishops of Rome" with them. Gone too were the Pelagians, although sufficient of these survived in Venetia to provoke from St. Leo a strong reminder to the metropolitan of Aquileia of his duty as guardian of the purity of the faith. Thirty years later still and Pope Gelasius is again exhorting to the same effect. To this universal submission of Rome to its bishop there was but one exception. The Barbarians who were now Rome's real rulers were Arians, and the popes had perforce to submit to the facts of Arian churches in their own city and an Arian bishop. To distinguish themselves from the heretical titulary they signed themselves " Bishop of the Catholic Church of Rome," or " Bishop of the Catholic Church," a style which has survived to this day as the consecrated formula for certain official acts. These years so barren, in the West, of events of ecclesiastical importance are years in which the routine of administration becomes more and more of a tradition; and for all that the new "national" frontiers are proving more and more of a barrier to easy communication between the pope and the bishops of the more distant sees, the tradition of intervention, of appeal and judgement, never weakens, is never lost. The opportunities are fewer, the intervention less efficacious. But the Roman habit remains, nor is it ever repudiated by the churches of these countries now politically independent of that power on which, in its last years, the popes had begun to rely as on the effective agent through whom their sanctions might function. The main centre of interest in the Church History of the fifth century is of course east of the Adriatic, in the great Christological controversies associated with the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), and in the long drawn out social and political crisis which follows this last. Syria and Egypt are, during this half-century, the scene of a never ending religious warfare that strains all the resources of the imperial government, until, to save the empire's political unity it devises a compromise between Catholics and heretics. This is the famous Henoticon of the emperor Zeno (482). Its author is the Catholic Bishop of Constantinople, Acacius. For his share in it he is excommunicated by that zealous guardian of orthodoxy Pope Felix III (483-492), and his church and indeed all Eastern Catholicism supporting him, there begins, in 484, the long Acacian Schism (448-519). The century ends with the pope in a curious isolation. Throughout the West the rulers, with one exception, are heretical Arians: and the exception is the one real Barbarian among them, and a Catholic of very recent conversion. The ruler of the East, the Roman Emperor, is a heretic too, a Monophysite; and the Catholics of the empire, thanks to Acacius, are in schism. It is at this lamentable time that the ambition and jealousy of some of the leading Roman clergy inaugurate a series of disputes which are to trouble the peace of Rome itself for nearly forty years. Before they are healed there is once more a Catholic emperor at Constantinople. The peaceful relations of the Arian king in Italy, Theodoric, with the Empire are broken. There is a kind of persecution, and the pope dies in Theodoric's prison (526), and the last great intellectual of Christian Antiquity, Boethius, is put to death at his command. The truce between Italy and the desolation, which until now has spared her, is at an end; nor will] peace return until Italy, the old Italy, is burnt and ravaged as was no other part of this unhappy empire. The Roman Church itself had been singularly fortunate during this century of political revolution. While the empire was fast disappearing, and while everywhere in the West Catholicism was becoming subject to Arian rulers, its calm, ordered life went on with hardly any disturbance. But as the century drew to its close this happy state of things came to an end, and, thanks very largely to clerical ambition, an age of bitter dissension succeeded, marked by schisms and destined to leave to future generations more than one mischievous precedent in the matter of papal elections. The choice of the Roman bishop, like the choice of every other bishop, had originally been the exclusive business of his own church. Disputed elections were not unknown, even in the days of the persecutions, nor scandalous attempts to enthrone a rival to the pope. It was one of the inevitable consequences of the growth of the Church after Constantine, and its new status as a body recognised and protected by the emperor, that, henceforward, such disputes passed rapidly into the political life of the city, so that the government could no longer be indifferent to the circumstance of the election. Twice in the fourth century, when the hostility of the rival parties had developed into riots and pitched battles in the streets, the government had intervened in the interests of public order. The first occasion was during the reign of the usurper Maxentius (307-312). We know almost nothing about it, except that a faction set up Heraclius in opposition to the pope, Eusebius, that the emperor banished both pope and anti- pope, that the pope died shortly afterwards, and that the Roman See then remained vacant for nearly two years. The second occasion was the much more serious affair of Ursinus fifty years later. This dispute went back to the exile of Pope Liberius in 356 for his opposition to the Arian emperor, Constantius II. Liberius exiled, the government installed in his place Felix, his archdeacon. Three years later Liberius was allowed to return and, although the government seems to have had in mind a regime where Liberius and Felix would together rule the Roman Church, the faithful were of another mind. They rose and Felix fled. Later he returned, and made another bid for power. He was once more defeated and thenceforward lived in retirement until his death (365) when, thanks to the tact and clemency of Liberius, his followers submitted and unity was restored. Nine months later, however, before there had been time for the old bitterness to disappear, and while the expediency of Liberius' policy was still a subject of bitter disagreement, Liberius too died. The minority of intransigents whom the dead pope's mercy had scandalised, thereupon elected Ursinus. The majority elected Damasus a one- time supporter of Felix. The immediate sequel to the election was a siege of the basilica held by the Ursinians and a three days' riot in which many lives were lost. The government recognised Damasus. Ursinus and his supporters were banished. None the less, so long as Damasus reigned (366-384), they continued to be a menace to the peace of his Church. Thirty years after Damasus the civil authority once more had occasion to intervene, and again on the ground of public order. This time, however, it seems to have made its own convenience the rule by which it decided which of the rivals was the legitimate bishop. Pope Zosimus, as the story of his intervention in the affair of Pelagius has shown, was as headlong in his methods as he was imperious in his tone. Long before the end of his short reign there were complaints from his clergy and petitions to the emperor. These were still undecided and Zosimus occupied with the petitioners when, somewhat unexpectedly, he died (December 27, 418). The division in the Church showed immediately. While the majority of the clergy were burying the pope at St. Laurence- outside-the-walls, his chief assistant Eulalius assembled his supporters at the Lateran and had himself elected. The next day, ignoring this coup de main, the rest of the clergy met in accordance with canonical custom, and elected the priest Boniface. The government decided for Eulalius and Boniface was banished. He appealed against the decision and, thanks to the influence of the Empress Galla Placidia, the emperor now allowed that the election was doubtful and summoned both parties to Ravenna where a council would judge the matter. The council, however, could not come to a decision, and a greater council was thereupon convoked to meet at Spoleto in six months. Meanwhile neither Eulalius nor Boniface were to return to Rome. This pact Eulalius broke, in his ambition to pontificate at Easter in the Lateran basilica. He was, however, arrested and expelled while, under the protection of the soldiery, the Bishop of Spoleto, whom the emperor had appointed to administer the Roman Church until the coming council, carried out the accustomed solemnities. This raid of Eulalius ended the government's dilemma. He was simply set aside and Boniface recognised without further formality. The council at Spoleto was revoked, and the incident closed. The twelve weeks it had lasted were the sole brief interruption of a peace otherwise unbroken for a hundred and twenty years (379-498). The disturbances that marked the end of the fifth century were of a more serious character. Their cause did not lie solely in differences of policy, but, to some extent, in the increasing attraction of the papacy as a source of wealth and power. The see had been liberally endowed by Constantine, and the social importance of the pope fifty years later had been the subject of the pagan Prefect of Rome's reply to Damasus asking when he too would become a Christian, "To-morrow if you will make me Bishop of Rome." Now, in 483, the Pope Simplicius either to check a growing custom or to provide against an abuse that threatened forbade and annulled in advance any alienation of church property by a future pope made as a reward to those who had hoped to elect him. The decree witnesses certainly to a decline from the primitive simplicity of the Roman clerical life. In the two elections which followed, those of 492 and 496, the decree does not seem to have been transgressed, but when Anastasius II died, in 498, there was a double election and a division which lasted throughout the whole pontificate of the new pope Symmachus (498-514), and in the course of this schism the decree of 483 was renewed in a rather curious fashion. Anastasius II, like Liberius in the previous century, had alienated many of the clergy by his conciliatory policy towards repentant schismatics. At his death each party elected its pope, the intransigents Laurence and the late pope's supporters Symmachus. As in 418, and in 366, there were riots, battles in the streets between the two parties, sieges of basilicas, general disorder and not a few deaths. There was no longer any emperor in Italy. It fell to the Gothic king Theodoric to intervene, and Theodoric was an Arian. He decided in favour of Symmachus and Laurence made his submission. It was, however, a submission in name alone, for Laurence turned next to direct a campaign against his rival's good name and he was so successful that Symmachus was summoned to Ravenna to clear himself, while Theodoric appointed a Visitator at Rome to rule the see until the affair was judged. It was Theodoric again who chose the judges a council of bishops which met in Rome in May, 500. Symmachus, after a first consent, refused to appear. The bishops, refusing to judge an absent man, wished to go home. Theodoric constrained them to remain. The deadlock was complete and it lasted for eighteen months until in October, 501, the council solemnly left the question of the pope's guilt to God. They would not condemn where they had not judged, nor would they consent to judge the accused in his absence. It was indeed "absolution by default." 'The council then broke up and, to add to the trouble, Laurence reappeared, strong this time in support of Theodoric. The riots and the street fighting were resumed. Symmachus, free from the royal council, now called his bishops together and in November, 502, solemnly protesting that his see was beyond man's judgement, he consented to clear himself of the charges made. It had been alleged that he had contravened the decree of 483. This he did not so much deny as declare the crime impossible since the decree, from the circumstances in which it was made, was null and void. Now, remodelled, he presented it to the council. It was accepted, and confirmed, too, by Theodoric. Symmachus, however, did not manage to secure more than a minority of his clergy, and despite the council of 502 the miniature civil war continued for another five years, until Theodoric abandoned Laurence, whereupon his party collapsed. Symmachus, for the remainder of his reign, was undisturbed, but it was not until his death (514) and the election of Hormisdas that the dissentients really submitted and that unity was restored. Hormisdas (514-523) owes his place in Church History to the settlement of a greater scandal than the local dissensions in Rome. This was the schism of Acacius, which for thirty-five years had divided East and West, and given the Monophysites a whole generation in which to entrench themselves unhindered in Syria and Egypt. The religious reunion involved of course a renewal of relations between pope and emperor, between, that is to say, these Roman subjects of the Gothic king and their distant sovereign at Constantinople who was also, nominally, Theodoric s sovereign too. The schism which antedated Theodoric's coming into Italy had certainly helped to make his independence a reality. Its termination might be expected to have some reaction on his standing. Theodoric had also been intimately concerned with the affairs of the Roman Church, and it was very natural that when, in 515, the new pope first approached the emperor, the Gothic king should be consulted. He made no objection to the scheme which would bring together once more his Catholic subjects and their ancient sovereign. Perhaps the fact that the sovereign was himself as little a Catholic as Theodoric Monophysite where the Goth was Arian made it easy to acquiesce. The negotiations, however, failed. Four years later, in very different circumstances, the matter was reopened. The Monophysite emperor was now dead. His successor was a Catholic and, a thing unknown for more than a hundred years, a Latin. This was Justin I, and to seek reconciliation with Rome was the first act of his reign. Hormisdas stated his terms the famous Formula of Hormisdas which all the bishops of the East were to sign, renewing their belief in the traditional primacy of the Roman See and soon the Eastern Empire was the scene of a vigorous restoration of Catholicism directed by the imperial government. One of its features was the renewal of the old policy against religious dissidents. The remnants of the old heretical sects were persecuted, their property confiscated, and their churches handed over to the Catholics. Among these sects were the Arians. Theodoric moved by the complaints of his co-religionists, undertook their defence. The news of the persecution, apparently, fanned into flame Theodoric's growing suspicion bred of the new frequency of relations since the healing of the schism of a plot between his Romans and the emperor. A timely denunciation led to the arrest and trial for treason of three officers of high rank, almost the last representatives in public life of the old consular stock, the Patrician Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus his father-in-law. They were judged by the senate and unanimously judged guilty. After a longish interval they were put to death. That interval Boethius employed to write the classic ever since associated with his name, De Consolatione Philosophiae, one of the world's great books. But in Boethius the Gothic king's fury slew a much greater man than even the author of this famous meditation. Boethius was perhaps the last man in the West to possess, as his natural inheritance, the philosophic and scientific culture of classical antiquity. He was a Catholic and a theologian and, most important of all for the historian of the medieval culture, a student of Aristotle. His translations and commentaries of Aristotle were, in fact, almost the only source through which the early Middle Ages knew anything at all of the thought which its greatest mind was one day to use to make good the insufficiencies of St. Augustine and to give the Christian faith, at last, an exposition rationally adequate. Boethius and his companions were not Theodoric's only victims. To save the Arians the king despatched an embassy to Constantinople with the request that the forcibly converted should be given back their religious liberty, and that the confiscated churches should be restored to them. It was a request for the restoration of Arianism, and to lead the embassy that made it, Theodoric chose the pope. This was John I, who had succeeded Hormisdas two years before. The mission made its way to the capital and the pope, the first pope ever to set foot in Constantinople, was received with every imaginable honour. But his diplomacy gained nothing for Theodoric, and on their return, empty handed, the king threw the ambassadors into prison. There, in May, 526, the pope died of his sufferings. Three months later Theodoric, too, was dead, but not before he had made over the Catholic churches of his capital to the Arians. Also he had perpetrated the striking innovation of naming the new pope Felix IV, ex iussu Theodorici regis, to quote the simple phrase of the Liber Pontificalis which is all we know of the affair. With this heretic king's nomination of Felix IV in 526 there opened for the Roman See a highly disturbed ten years. Felix, pope by grace of Theodoric's innovation, proceeded, by an innovation still more striking, to nominate the cleric who was to be his own successor, giving as his reason that this method would save the expense of the inevitable disputes. He first of all made certain of the support of the new king who had succeeded Theodoric, and then named the man of his choice, the archdeacon Boniface. The senate, too, supported him, and all went well until, November 22, 530, Felix died. His procedure had been novel and it had also flagrantly broken the law of Symmachus, not yet thirty years old, which forbade such preoccupation with the succession while the pope was yet alive. The majority of the clergy, therefore, ignored the late pope's nomination and elected Dioscoros, an able Greek to- whom had been owing the final victory of Symmachus over his foes, and who had been the chief agent of the peace with the East in the time of Hormisdas. Boniface of course had his partisans. Both were consecrated, and only the sudden death of Dioscoros saved Rome from a renewal of the scenes of 499. His party were sufficiently disinterested not to give him a successor but to recognise Boniface. Once more all seemed well. Boniface, however, was not of those whom success chastens. He treated the one-time supporters of his rival with contumely and then, but more solemnly, in full synod, imitating Felix IV, proceeded also to name his successor the deacon Vigilius. Some time afterwards he rescinded the decree as being beyond his powers, and then, October 17, 532, his short but not uneventful reign ended. At his death the disorders, to whose presence the unseemly transactions of the last few years point so unmistakably, broke out in all their unpleasantness: intrigues, of course, riots, and bribes, to pay which even the church plate was sold, are what the history of the vacancy has to record, and one of the chief acts of the pope who followed John II is a strong law against simony. John II reigned for little longer than his predecessor (532-535) and his successor, Agapitus I, died abroad at Constantinople, where he had gone as the envoy of the Gothic king in a hopeless attempt to ward off Justinian's impending reconquest of Italy. It so happened that his arrival at Constantinople coincided with an attempt of the empress, Theodora, to install a Monophysite there as bishop. The pope was- able to defeat her and to secure the succession-for a-Catholic, whom he himself consecrated. Whence, on the pope's sudden death (536) the not unnatural scheme on the part of the empress to secure the election- as pope of one who would be her tool. Her choice fell on one of the dead pope's entourage the deacon Vigilius who had been Pope Boniface II's nominee in 532. Vigilius, with this illustrious patronage to support him, hurried home to find, however, the election over and-the new pope, Silverius, consecrated. It was not, of course, too late to intrigue. Silverius was given his chance of making the concessions the empress desired. He refused. The Gothic army, meanwhile, had begun the siege of Rome, and Vigilius presented to the imperial commander, Belisarius, forged letters according to which the pope promised to deliver to the enemy the gate nearest his palace of the Lateran. Silverius was summoned to the palace. An interview with Belisarius followed at which Vigilius alone assisted, and Silverius disappeared. It was announced that he had gone to be a monk and that the see was vacant. At the assembly of the clergy Belisarius presented Vigilius as the imperial candidate and he was elected. A few months later Silverius died of starvation, on the island off the Italian coast whither he had been exiled. Theodora's plan had succeeded and the precedent of imperial intervention in papal elections thus set was to hold for the next two hundred years. For in the Gothic war just beginning the empire was victorious. Its practical result was the annexation of Italy to that Eastern political system whose centre was Constantinople the empire that had long ceased to be Roman and was already Byzantine and although in the election of the pope the clergy kept their freedom, it was henceforward the practice that their choice should be confirmed by the emperor before the pope-elect was consecrated.

ST. PATRICK AND THE CONVERSION OF THE IRISH The century in which the central government in the West collapsed, and whose close saw barbarian kings ruling in all the old provinces, was not the most favourable time for propaganda and expansion. Western Catholicism might be thought fortunate, if, amid the new chaos, it contrived to hold what it had already gained. In two respects, however, it did more than this. It converted the Irish and it produced the Benedictine rule, thereby preparing all-unconsciously two of the chief instruments for the future Catholicising of the Western peoples and for the restoration of letters and thought when, after a century yet more barbarian than the fifth, they seemed about to perish entirely from continental Europe. The agent of the conversion of the Irish was St. Patrick-about whose life we know so much and so little. He was born, where exactly no one knows and all the authorities dispute, somewhere in Britain towards the close of the fourth century. Maximus, the commander of the legions in Britain, had lately crossed with them to the continent to dispute successfully with Gratian the sovereignty of the West, and, more recently still, he had in his turn been defeated and destroyed by Theodosius (388). These were years in which Britain was increasingly the objective of pirate raids from the coasts of Germany and from Ireland, and in one such raid Patrick, a lad of sixteen, was captured by the Irish and sold into slavery. In Ireland he remained for six years, a slave shepherding his master's sheep, and in the long nights of vigil discovering the joys of union with God in prayer. In a vision or dream he was bidden to make his escape, and after an adventurous journey across the whole length of the country, and a sea voyage on a pirate ship, he came to south-western Gaul-then in the throes of the struggle between contending Roman armies. The interval of eighteen years between this escape and the saint's return to Ireland in 432, as a bishop commissioned to preach the faith, he employed in preparation for the work to which already he knew himself divinely called. In Italy, or in Gaul, he embraced the monastic life and, like many another, wandered from one centre to another always seeking yet better teaching. Amongst other places Lerins, then in the glory of its first beginnings under St. Honoratus, almost certainly knew him, and Marmoutier too where the memory of St. Martin, dead only twenty years before, was still fresh. Later, for a long time, Patrick lived at Auxerre. It was here that he was ordained deacon and here, under its famous bishop, St. Germanus, he made his studies and perfected his ascetical equipment. He was still at Auxerre when the great moment of his life came and he was chosen-the first nominee Palladius having seemingly died unexpectedly-to lead this new venture "to the Scots who believed in Christ." That there were already Catholics in Ireland before St. Patrick's mission is certain, possibly even scattered groups of them, the fruit of commercial relations with the already evangelised Britain and Gaul. They were, however, so few as to be historically unimportant. Irish Catholicism, henceforth an astonishingly permanent feature of the life of the universal church, undoubtedly has St. Patrick for its founder. And the foundation was his personal work. For the next thirty years the saint unceasingly toured the country preaching and instructing, establishing centres and ordaining from his converts bishops to rule them. From the beginning the new conquest was markedly monastic in its inclinations. The number of those of both sexes among the first converts who sought to follow the apostle in the perfection of his own monastic life moved his deepest admiration. In this willingness of the first neophytes to embrace a life of ordered austerity, there lay dormant a force which, in the next century, was to revolutionise the new ecclesiastical organisation and produce a most singular anomaly in Church government. There was in Ireland nothing of that urban organisation of life which characterised the empire in which Patrick was born. There were no cities in which to place his numerous bishops. The seat of the primitive see was a kind of clerical village, founded for the purpose, where dwelt together bishop and clergy, catechists, monks and nuns, a centre of administration and of further propaganda. The distance between such settlements and monasteries of the Eastern type is not very great. In a country already enthusiastic for the life of perfection under a vow of obedience, and in an age of monastic propaganda, that distance was soon bridged. It was from Britain that the first impetus came of that new development, which, sixty years after St. Patrick's death (461), began to sweep all before it and transform the Irish Church. Here, in the dark century which followed the Roman abandonment of the province, the church was organised on strongly monastic lines and the personage to whom the new prestige of monk over cleric, of abbot over bishop, owed its being was, apparently, the British monk St. Gildas. Once this new influence had crossed the Irish Sea with the British-trained Irish monks like St. Enda and St. Finian of Clonard, the clerical settlements became monasteries and their abbots the first ecclesiastical personages of the country. The see is now lost to view behind the monastery. Jurisdiction is no longer confined to bishops, nor even to bishops who are also abbots. It comes, in the course of the sixth century, to be exercised by abbots who are not bishops at all. The line of bishops continues, but, while the government is in the hands of an abbot in priest's orders, the bishop one of the monks, chosen for consecration by his abbot confines himself to the ritual and sacramental functions proper to his order. All the great names henceforward are abbots and if, at the same time, the abbot is a bishop, it is as the abbot that he is celebrated. Even the metropolitan see fixed by St. Patrick at Armagh ceased to function as such, and the all-conquering prestige of monasticism is witnessed by descriptions of the pope as the Abbot of Rome and, even, of the devil as the Abbot of Hell. For a hundred years after St. Patrick's death his work steadily developed, and then, the country converted and the church " monasticised," the zeal and asceticism of the Irish monks began to look overseas for new objectives. So there began that astonishing missionary odyssey of the race that is still with us. Upon Britain and Gaul and Germany and Italy they poured out, taking with them much of their own peculiar spirituality, and, through their own stark asceticism, scaring into repentance the decadent Catholics of the now barbarised Roman provinces. The earliest influences in Irish Monasticism were, it seems agreed, Egyptian, passing to Ireland through such Western centres as Lerins. Obedience to a superior, publicly vowed for life in an explicit formula, is the foundation on which it rests. The earliest rule that has survived in the modern sense of a code of regulations is that of St. Mochuta (637). The most famous of all, that of St. Columbanus, drawn up for continental monks, reflects Irish conditions and is inspired by the Irish spirit. The-monasteries were of the utmost simplicity, collections of tiny huts of wood or stone with one or more oratories, a kitchen, and a common refectory; the whole enclosed by a wall. There were convents too for women, the oldest known of which is St. Brigid's (450-525) famous foundation at Kildare. The novices were recruited almost exclusively from the higher and middle classes. Monastic life as these Irish founders conceived it, and as their disciples practised it, was a life of continuous, incredible severity the " white martyrdom," it was called, in contradistinction to the more suddenly ended "red" martyrdom of persecution. The standard for all was not merely high but heroic: in Irish Monasticism there was no place for mediocrity. Obedience, of course, was absolute, nor could the monk own. There was an absolute avoidance of the other sex, and generally no communication at all with one's family. Prayer, manual work and study filled the monk's day. Prayer, the recitation day by day of the psalter interspersed with readings from Holy Scripture and the Fathers; and prayer, too, as a penance with peculiarities that were to mark the Irish and their converts throughout Europe, with endless prostrations and genuflections, and the Endurance of the "crossfigel," prayer, that is to say, with the hands stretched in the form of a cross: prayer too with the pray-er immersed in icy water. Manual work might be agricultural, and it took in all the crafts and the arts necessary to provide for the community's needs. Mass was celebrated, with much diversity of rite, on all Sundays and feasts, and the monks communicated. Almost every day the monk fasted. His one meal he took about three in the afternoon, vegetables, eggs and fish. Meat he never ate. For drink there was milk, whey and a beer that is likened to whey, and water. To drink nothing but water was a special asceticism, and for the practice of it tradition honoured St. David of Wales as "the Waterman." Silence held the monastery all day. On the rare feast-days there was a milder regime. The tale of the rule's austerity ends with the mention that it allowed as little sleep as was necessary. Breaches against the rule were punished by corporal punishment liberally administered. The monk who broke the silence received six strokes, for leaving the monastery without the abbot's blessing twelve strokes, for needless gossiping conversation fifty, for speaking to a woman a hundred. This particular austerity was all the more shocking in a country where flogging had no place in the civil law. The sick of course were exempted from these rigours and tenderly cared for. The dead were buried with special office and mass for three days-suffrages repeated annually at the anniversary of their death. For the repose of their souls the brethren offered prayers and fasts and alms. By the year 600 there was a certain uniformity of observance along these lines, and we can speak of Irish Monasticism as a definite recognisable force. The monks also studied. "To the Irish mind an illiterate monk was a contradiction in terms. The summit and crown of their learning was the knowledge of Holy Scripture. It was for this that, in the conning centuries, students were to cross to Ireland in their thousands. All other study was, originally, ancillary to this. The Gospels, the epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms these, above all, were the objects of this devoted meditation. The monks learned the text by heart and gave themselves lovingly to the commentaries allegorical, in the fashion of the time. It is impossible to exaggerate their familiarity with the Bible. Its imagery, its histories, passed into the common treasury of the writers; and in one saint's life after another the re-appearance of the biblical stories in a new dress witnesses to the lore in which the hagiographers were steeped. But the Latin bible which they studied was written in a foreign tongue. Western Catholicism was, for the first time, faced with the problem of converting a people to whom its own language was unknown. Whence in these Irish schools a preliminary course of Latin studies, the essential grammar alone at first and with it the Fathers. Then, inevitably, with the study of those last great products of the ancient-classical culture something, little by little, of that culture itself, the Latin poets and orators, the Hellenistic mathematicians and natural philosophers. The accident that for the study of Sacred Scripture the aliment without which no monk could live the Irish monk must learn the classic Latin language, and learn it, necessarily, in the masterpieces, made the Irish monk something of a cultured scholar at a time when, in the monasteries of the Latin culture itself, such scholarship was frowned on as worldly, and the masterpieces banned. The accident had thereby another important effect. It did much to preserve for the later centuries a knowledge of the Latin language that was scientific, for it was taught and learnt in Ireland as a dead language, carefully and, if at times pedantically, correctly where, universally, throughout the continent, its purity was suffering violence from the tongues of the new Barbarian kings. In the religious homes of this remote isle the light still painfully burned from which, a little later, the continental church was to be re-illumined. The old native Irish culture was at first most carefully shunned as a Pagan thing. Then, as the new faith showed itself unquestionably victorious, this, too, began to influence the monks, and from the end of the sixth century a certain fusion is evident and a mixed Biblical-Classical-National culture is in process of formation. A system of orthography was devised and now, for the first time, the ancient Irish language began to be written with letters.

ST. BENEDICT AND THE HOLY RULE In St. Patrick's boyhood the Empire still ruled all the West, even his native Britain. He had been dead nineteen years when St. Benedict of Nursia was born (480) and by that time the Empire had disappeared even from Italy. The Italy of St. Benedict was the Italy of the Ostrogoths and Theodoric, of Belisarius and Justinian's war of recovery. The seventy years or so of his life covered that period when plague and famine and war cleaved the abyss that separates Romans from Italians. He himself is one of the last of the Romans, and it may be safely said that the spirit of Rome, baptised now, is the inspiration of all that is new, revolutionary even, in his work. St. Benedict was not, however, Roman by birth, although educated in the ancient capital. He came from Nursia, which is near Spoleto, and his family were wealthy country landowners. At the age of seventeen he fled from Rome to live as a solitary, thirty miles away, in the wild fastness that is now Subiaco (c. 497). Disciples gathered round him whom finally he organised in twelve communities of twelve monks each. There were rebellions against his rule, attempts even to poison him, and twenty years or so after his first coming to Subiaco he moved to Cassinum, half way between Rome and Naples. Here he dwelt for the remaining years of his life, the years that saw the murder of Boethius, the downfall of Theodoric's kingdom and the victories of Belisarius and Narses. Here the Gothic king Totila visited him, and heard the prophecy of his fate. Here, too, most important of all, the saint wrote the Holy Rule. The date of his death is not accurately known. The year which used, traditionally, to be considered correct 543 is almost certainly wrong and the latest, well-reasoned, theory would place it between 555 and 557. The circumstances in which the great work was composed are not known. The latest and most ingenious suggestion is that it was written, not for any particular monastery St. Benedict had founded, or was about to found, nor for any particular group to be formed in the future from his own foundations, but simply as a universal rule for monks: that it was compiled to serve for all time as the quasi-official code of monastic life and compiled at the request of some pope, most probably Hormisdas (514-523). We do, however, know of St. Benedict's varied experience through twenty-five years of life as a superior of monks, and the text of the rule itself reveals him as a man thoroughly well acquainted with all the earlier literature of Monasticism. Holy Scripture, the preceding rules of the Egyptians and Eastern founders, the lives of the primitive saints, the works of the Fathers especially of John Cassian who, founder of the monastery at Marseilles, was to the West the greatest of all guides in this matter a knowledge of all these is easily traced in the rule. It is however no mere mosaic of compilation, but a work of striking originality. Earlier rules had been little more than lists of prohibitions, or of spiritual maxims, with brief statements of practical details. Now, for the first time, there came into being an ordered practical code, covering every aspect of the monk's life, a code which itself created a way of living and would, ultimately, create a type of monk. Monastic life, so far, had been life in the tradition of some great monastic personality. Henceforward not personalities, but the universal decreed law is to form the monk, the "Holy Rule" (a new expression), the "Mistress Rule" to use the saint's own phrase. Not the abbot as such is supreme, but the rule which he administers and whence he, too, derives. It is the old Roman notion of the rule of law transferred to the service of the religious life, and thence derives one of the rule's leading characters it does not counsel but commands. It is objective, permanent, absolute. The superior does but apply it. The Holy Rule-begins with a succinct survey of current monastic practice, and its decision that monks who "fight under the rule and an abbot" lead a life superior to that of the solitary who is his own lawgiver, ended for all time ill the West the prestige that so easily accrues to more picturesque methods of asceticism. The rule describes itself as "a little rule for beginners." It sets up " a school of divine service," and its whole spirit is described when it orders that "all things must be done in moderation for the sake of those who are less hardy." Again and again this experienced discretion shows itself. The first psalm of the night office is to he said slowly, in order to give the laggard a final chance. The food is to be sufficient and, since what suits one may not suit another, two dishes are always to be provided. Again, " Although we read that 'wine is not the drink of monks at all,' yet, since in our days they cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree not to drink to satiety, but sparingly, Because wine maketh even the wise to fall away." A sufficiency of sleep is prescribed and of clothing too. There is no such thing as corporal punishment, nor any provision for such penitential exercises as hair-shirts, spiked belts, self-inflicted scourgings. Private feats of this nature are sternly discouraged. The monks should do nothing except what the common rule of the monastery and the example of superiors exhorts. Once and for all, with this "Rule for Monks," the extravagance of the East, whose example burdened early Western Monasticism beyond what the ordinary man could bear, is set aside. In the matter of mortification, as in all else, individualism ceases to be set at a premium. Rivalry in such things is not to be tolerated. Association in a common mode of life is the way of the monk's sanctification. This twofold break, with corporal austerities and individual self-maceration, is again revolutionary. The asceticism of the rule is none the less real. Its basis is, of course, an utter renouncement of one's own will "to walk by another's judgement and command." The routine of prayer, study and work; the frequent fasts; the perpetual abstinence from meat; these were the monk's aids, striving ever more earnestly to strip himself of all slavery to self, that he might give himself wholly to God. The monks "do not live by their own free will, or obey their own desires and pleasures, but walk by another's judgement and command." "It is not lawful for monks to have either their bodies or their wills at their own disposal." The rule carefully prescribes the hours of rising and for sleep, different in winter and summer. It regulates in detail the order of the day's occupations, the different hours for the common prayer, which is "the work of God," for the reading, the manual labour, the meals. Monks who are priests are exceptional, and they are warned against temptations to pride and insubordination which may arise from the distinction. The nature of the primitive life under the rule of St. Benedict has, in recent years, been the subject of much discussion. The first monasteries, it is suggested, would be founded by the generosity of the wealthy, endowed with lands and all that then necessarily went with the land, its villages, its slaves and its serfs (mancipia and coloni). The rule seems to suggest that agricultural work would be exceptional, a thing to which the monk ought gladly to submit if poverty or local necessity made it inevitable. Abbot Chapman even says, "the idea that monks were agriculturalists would have horrified St. Benedict." What then was the work which occupied the monks? The different arts and crafts necessary for the maintenance of the property, and the household duties: kitchen, cellar, service, garden, wood and metal work; copying, teaching the younger monks "To 'study' or to write books would be rare" and St. Bede is almost the only simple monk of the early times to be an author (as he remains the one Benedictine canonised as a simple monk). "The sixth-century monk was not a scholar nor an author like some of the Maurists, nor a farm labourer like the Trappists. But he worked hard and he read enormously." The discipline is never that of a regiment, but that of an ordered Christian family whose aim is to realise the gospel ideal. The continuity of this family spirit is based upon yet another of St. Benedict's innovations, the famous vow of stability by which the monk pledges himself, not merely to live as a monk for ever, but to live as a monk for ever in the community which now receives him. This has been described as St. Benedict's most important and most characteristic contribution to Monachism in the West. Since the rule contemplates a family, the superior is primarily a father, and if the rule gives to the abbot practically unlimited discretion, it never ceases to remind him that his authority is paternal and that his pattern in its exercise is Christ Himself- Whose name indeed few pages of the rule are without. Here, again, is to be noted the trace of the saint's experienced humanity the abbot is bidden to consider the weaklings and not to allow the strong to set the pace of the monastery's observance, and he is warned "not to be too suspicious, or he will never be at rest." It is the monks who choose their abbot, and they choose him for life. In turn the abbot chooses his assistants chooses them and changes them at will. A compassionate understanding of the weakness of human nature, a serene patience in presence of its failure, a calm confidence in the ultimate attainment of the highest ideals through the perfecting of the ordinary ways of life, an absence of exaggeration in the Holy Rule the Gospel finds the greatest of its human reflections. It was to produce in the ensuing centuries hundreds and thousands of communities, and the autonomous self- sufficing monasteries where they dwelt were to be, in the nature of things, centres of economic and social life no less than of religion. With their slaves, their tenants, the pilgrims whom religious motives drew, the abbeys became inevitably centres of trade, fostering the arts and crafts, with a social role like to that of the Roman cities now rapidly decaying. Along with the bishop, the abbey was to be the greatest force staving off the universal tendency to social disruption; and for the Church it was the appointed instrument of apostolic work in the age of transition from an urban to a rural economy.

ST. GREGORY, FOUNDER OF THE MIDDLE AGES ST. GREGORY THE GREAT was Roman by birth and heir to one of the last surviving names of the old pre-Christian aristocracy. He was born during the first period of Justinian's war to recover Italy for the central government, and his boyhood saw the successive sieges of Rome by Goth and Roman, years of famine, plague and destruction which left-on his sensitive spirit an expectancy of doom thenceforth ineffaceable. He was a child of six when, in 546, Totila, meditating to erase from memory the very knowledge of where Rome had stood, cleared the city of its entire population and left it for six weeks abandoned to the beasts of the Campagna. He was fourteen when, the last Goth driven out, Justinian, in the Pragmatic Sanction, gave the ruined country its new constitution as a province of the empire whose centre was Constantinople. Another fourteen years and then, in 568, over the Alps from the north-east came the last and most savage of Italy's barbaric invaders: the Lombards. In ten years they wrested from the empire the greater part of the interior, and inaugurated a war of raids and sieges on the rest which was to go on with little intermission for another two centuries. St. Gregory, at the time of the Lombard invasion, was already well advanced in the public life which his rank and wealth opened to him. He was by now Praetor of Rome, responsible for the city's financial administration and for the police, sitting as judge in the courts and, an immense responsibility in these days of continuous warfare, charged also with the task of maintaining the city's supply of food. At the age of thirty-five the praetor became a monk, after long hesitation bred of doubts whether in such time of crisis it was not his first duty to serve the State. He sold his vast property, and from part of the proceeds founded seven monasteries. One of them was his own Roman house on the Coelian. Here he continued to live as -one of the monks, following, the thing seems certain, the rule of St. Benedict. He was allowed just f- r years of the peace he craved. Then, in 579 the newly-elected pope, Pelagius II, ordained him deacon and despatched him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius ambassador at the Imperial Court. There he remained for seven years, occupied with the delicate business of restraining the Byzantine habits of the cesaro-papist sovereigns whenever they threatened to invade the sphere of the papal primacy. Political affairs, too, were in his charge: the Lombard menace to Rome the insufficiency of the imperial representatives who, from Ravenna, governed Roman Italy; the plight of Rome itself where, already, the pope was de facto ruler. The city often enough was undefended, lacked troops, and, almost as often, when it had a garrison it lacked the means to pay it. Hence the Romans feared the troops within as much as they feared the Barbarian without. The responsibility for the city's welfare was already falling on the pope, who, however, before the law, was only the emperor's subject. There was abundant matter to occupy the diplomacy of the apocrisiarius. The contrast between the half-abandoned, ruined city from which he had come and the glory of Constantinople as Justinian had left it would matter the less to the new ambassador since, during all his stay in the splendid capital, he still contrived to live as a monk. Several of his brethren went with him from Rome and the embassy became a monastery. At Constantinople St. Gregory met the Spanish bishop, Leander of Seville, then in exile and negotiating the emperor's help for his patron, the Catholic heir to the Visigoth throne. So began one of the many great friendships of St. Gregory's life. Here too, in conferences given to his monks, he began one of the most celebrated of his works, the Commentary on Job, and in a matter of theological controversy he engaged no less a personage than the Patriarch of Constantinople himself. So for seven years the rich new experience continued and then the pope needed him in Rome. In January 590, four years later, Pelagius II died and the expected happened: St. Gregory was elected in his place the place two of his family had already filled before him, Agapitus I, and his own great-grandfather Felix III. The new pope revealed himself immediately as a reformer of abuses. The archdeacon now and for a long time yet to come the first personage in the Roman Church after the pope was dismissed for peculation, the deacons ordered to confine themselves to their original duty of relieving the poor and the relief service of the Roman Church was reorganised from top to bottom. The papal household, too, underwent a similar reform. The lay element disappeared. The Lateran, hitherto the palace of an ecclesiastical prince, was henceforward a house where none but clerics dwelt, where business was transacted in an ordered round of prayer. It was almost a monastery. Fees for ordinations were abolished, fees due from those who received the pallium, fees for dispensations, and special licences. Finally St. Gregory took in hand the reorganisation of the great estates in Sicily, Italy and Gaul which were the source of the Roman Church's vast wealth-the Patrimony of St. Peter. This was his own personal work, and many letters remain to show how intimately he scrutinised its personnel and their accounts, and how scrupulously he observed the principle that these revenues should be employed in unstinted almsgiving. One of the most distinguished of French scholars has borrowed all English idea hi which briefly to sum up the essence of St. Gregory's personality. He sees in him the "landlord" of the best type, with the tradition of unstinted service for the public welfare, a sense of responsibility, and care, for dependants that knows no limits. To his rulership of the Church he brought something of the technique of the old imperial administration, and all the best of the Roman tradition: fidelity to law, respect for rights, impatience of disorder, whether from insubordination o r injustice, and the courtesy of business regularity. It is this same shrewd, kindly, fatherly spirit, practical always, never speculative, that informs all his writings. For St. Gregory wrote much, despite his well-filled days, and more directly even than St. Augustine did he, through his writings, influence the next thousand years. He is no scholar writing for scholars or the scholars for whom he writes would hardly have been recognised as such by the earlier writer but he is a great populariser of doctrine, the principal source of the forms of the popular piety and preaching of the early Middle Ages, the storehouse whence derived much of its legend and a hagiographical tradition, the creator of its liturgy, and the creator of the ideal by which it judged its spiritual rulers. As a theologian he is never, it is true, all original thinker. He has, in this respect, all the mediocrity that characterises all age of intellectual decline. He is not widely read. St. Cyprian, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine are his sources St. Augustine above all, not the boldly speculative St. Augustine but the preacher, the mystic and the moralist. It is the moralist who is supreme in St. Gregory. He is indeed one of the master moralists of Catholicism, and he sums up Catholic spirituality, as a life, in a wealth of clear and adequate phrases. His Moralia is an extension of the conferences on Job begun during his stay at Constantinople. It is a free running commentary on the text as it lies before him, whence a certain prolixity that runs out into thirty-five books. The sense of each verse is expounded, the literal, the allegorical and the moral, this last in the place of honour, the literal being no more than "the bark of the tree." The Moralia is a practical guide to the spiritual life. For centuries after St. Gregory it was the classic vade mecum of spiritual directors, thanks to its wealth of teaching on, for example, the contemplative life, its nature and the signs by which an aptitude for it is discerned, thanks to its directions for fostering and safeguarding that life, and to the saint's analysis of the temptations that beset it. Job, and the exegesis, are secondary to this practical aim. Equally important in its universal and long-lived influence was the book of St. Gregory's sermons, The Homilies. These are simple familiar " talks " on the gospel, preached during Mass. There is no rhetoric, no dogmatic profundity, but much allegory perhaps to our modern notions fantastic at times and the gift of summing up a lesson in axiomatic phrase, real genius for spiritual epigrams. There is, too, an abundance of stories, stories of the saints and stories of their miracles. St. Gregory, and through his book known as the Dialogues above all, is the great storyteller of the early Middle Ages, and here again he is one of that culture's primary founders. Finally, to conclude this rough summary of the most important of his many writings, he wrote the Regula Pastoralis a rule for bishops as important in its way as St. Benedict's rule for monks. It is a book to train and instruct and its aim is to raise the tone of the episcopate generally, to serve as an examen de conscience for those who are bishops. How much the book was needed other sections of this chapter will perhaps show, and the remark of a friend of St. Gregory's who had read it, " You lay down that no one should be consecrated who is not trained. Where then shall we find bishops at all?" The book was, from the first, an immense success. St. Gregory himself gave copies of it profusely, and it was immediately translated into Greek a rare honour indeed in this new age when the Romans of Constantinople were beginning to speak of Latin as a barbarian tongue. Many centuries later, as is well known, our own King Alfred had it translated into Anglo-Saxon for the benefit of a church more afflicted even than the church for which St. Gregory wrote it. All through the Middle Ages it continued to be copied and studied, and to be the basis of the spiritual formation of the medieval clergy. Had St. Gregory as pope done no more than write these three books he would still deserve his unique place among popes. But he was also, and primarily, a man of affairs, ruler and restorer of the spiritual kingdom committed to him. It was to a troubled heritage that St. Gregory came, the care. of churches universally afflicted, some of them seemingly to death. He took up that heritage in the spirit of one for whom the future could hold little promise, convinced as he was, and by signs apparently certain, that there was not even to be a future. None the less, his charge is henceforth his life; to it he consecrates all the energy of his practical administrative genius; he consoles the failing churches of the West; and he lays there the foundations of a new church, where the ancient cultures which are his by inheritance will shortly find their chief refuge when new barbarism drives them from their own homes, a church whence these cultures will return, to be the basis of the first revival of thought once the long night of war and rapine is passed. The first of the long line of monk-popes is, in the event, the greatest of all papal administrators; the saint whom only the sense of duty held from despair, and from the temptation to flee into solitude from the chronic desolation of his age, builds the foundations on which, even yet, much of our political and social life rests. More than any other. St. Gregory is, if any man can be it, the founder of Medieval Europe.

ITALY, GAUL AND SPAIN IN THE CENTURY OF ST. GREGORY In Italy by the time the Lombards arrived (568) the municipal regime of the empire as Diocletian rebuilt it had disappeared. In every city it was the bishop and the tribune who supported the burden of government, the ecclesiastical power and the army: at Rome the pope and the duke. From the safety of Ravenna and its lagoons the exarch ruled, in the emperor's name, what parts of Italy had escaped these Lombards: strips and patches along the coast-line, Rome, Naples, Aquileia, Apulia and Sicily, and kept the road between Ravenna and Rome. As the years went by this rule was less and less of a reality. Rome, in particular, the Lombard kings and dukes never ceased to covet. Its danger was henceforward a permanent feature of life. The emperors could not spare troops enough to clear the Lombards out of Italy, could not, very often, even defend adequately the towns the Lombards menaced. Policy and tradition, on the other hand, forbade them to negotiate with the Barbarian. They could not make war, they would not make peace. To protect Rome, and yet not betray the imperial policy, was already the great problem of papal diplomacy. Pelagius II had, in 586, successfully negotiated a three years' truce. It ended in 589 and three years later the Lombard army again marched on Rome. It fell to St. Gregory to organise the defence, to find money to pay the arrears of the imperial army's wages, to appoint military governors. There followed a military demonstration in the Campagna, and the Lombards retired. Next year they returned, in greater force than ever, headed by their king. This time it was by spiritual weapons that the pope conquered, and by the offer of tribute. In an interview he bought off the Lombards with an offer of 500 gold pounds annually. His real aim was a perpetual peace throughout Italy between the emperor and the Barbarian. Meanwhile he acted as intermediary, working on behalf of the prisoners taken in the numerous raids, finding ransoms, and assisting their distressed families. All this to the mixed amusement and annoyance of the incompetent Byzantine functionaries at Ravenna, who put every obstacle in his way, even to denouncing him at court as a traitor. In the end the pope's patient diplomacy won this much of success at least that, in 598, after thirty years of war, the emperor and the Lombards signed a definitive treaty. In matters more purely ecclesiastical St. Gregory exercises, and with refreshing vigour, all the rights of his see over the other churches of Italy. Dioceses depopulated in the long wars are united, vacant sees visited and administered by his delegates. Complaints against bishops are received and heard and decided without the intervention of any council. The Bishop of Amalfi is warned that if he will not reside in his diocese he will be interned in a monastery. The Bishop of Tarentum is suspended for causing a woman to be flogged. The Bishop of Naples is deposed. Outside the special sphere of St. Gregory's jurisdiction as metropolitan, there lie the suffragans of the other metropolitan sees, Milan, Aquileia, Ravenna. With these bishops the pope has, still, little direct relation. It is still their own metropolitan who confirms their election and gives them episcopal consecration. On the other hand the metropolitans themselves are in close relation with the pope. When the See of Ravenna falls vacant, it is the pope who names the Bishop of Cervia to make the visitation, and the newly-elected metropolitan goes to Rome to be consecrated by the pope. In 595 neither of the candidates proposed to the pope suited him, and he named one of his own monks. With Aquileia relations were still strained. After thirty years the schism bred of the action of Pelagius I during and after the General Council of 553 still endured. Nor was St. Gregory's patience ever able to end it. It survived his death, and Aquileia was only reconciled under Honorius I (625-638). If Aquileia was in schism, Milan was by this time foreign territory, in the power of the Lombards. It was as a refugee at Genoa, still imperial territory, that the successor of Laurentius (593) was consecrated. St. Gregory's delegate assisted, to confirm the election and to see that the newly-elect was consecrated by bishops of his own province as the custom there demanded. To him, as to the Metropolitan of Ravenna, St. Gregory sent the pallium. The leading figure in the religious life of Gaul during the first part of the century of St. Gregory was St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles. Like St. Honoratus and St. Hilary, Bishops of Arles a hundred years before, he was a monk of Lerins. Like them, too, he was a zealous missionary who by his continuous preaching and his endless journeys throughout the province where- he was metropolitan, did much to give the fervent ideals of Lerins a very wide influence indeed. He was also himself a monastic founder and the author of a very famous rule which, particularly in convents of women, carried all before it in Gaul until the coming of the rule of St. Benedict. But St. Caesarius has a greater claim to a place in history, as the agent responsible for a work of more general importance than the maintenance of the good Arlesian tradition of religious life. It was due to his decisive action that, after a century of more or less open conflict, the debates of the rival schools of Augustinians and semi-Pelagians were brought to an end. St. Caesarius is the hero of the Council of Orange of 529. To explain this we must go back to the closing years of St. Augustine's life, when his great theories on the nature and the working of Grace, after routing the pretensions of the system of Pelagius, were beginning to be a cause of lively discussions among the Catholics of southern Gaul. To make the story clearer it is perhaps better to anticipate what the controversy ultimately showed to be true that although the Church recognised officially the main lines of St. Augustine's teaching as against Pelagius, there were elements in that teaching on predestination, for example, and on the fate of unbaptised children which it did not make its own. It was in part around these points that the new discussions took place (419-429); but in opposing what we may call St. Augustine's personal theories, his critics followers of Cassian at the beginning of the fifth century and of St. Faustus, Bishop of Riez, at the end of it fell foul of the implications of the official anti-Pelagian teaching. The story can hardly be told, even summarily, without the introduction of more theological matter than there is space for here. The troubles came to a head and Rome was brought into them at the time of the reconciliation of the Eastern churches in 519. The treatise of St. Faustus, directed against the supporters of St. Prosper, who was himself a strong Augustinian, had come into the hands of those monks of Constantinople who, throughout the late schism, had been Rome's constant supporters. They read it as Pelagianism, and appealed for a decision to the Apostolic See. They also brought the book to the notice of the greatest theologian of the day, the African bishop, St. Fulgentius, then exiled for the faith to Sardinia. The pope, Hormisdas, referred his enquirers to the writings of St. Augustine and St. Prosper, and especially to the decision of the Roman Church given in the previous controversy a hundred years before. This, in the circumstances, was not enough to halt the discussions; and soon all southern Gaul was again filled with their noise It was how that St. Caesarius, metropolitan and also, by appointment of Pope Symmachus (498-514), papal vicar for the Visigothic Kingdom, took up the matter. He drew up and sent to the pope, Felix IV, a list of nineteen propositions which purported to resume the Catholic teaching on the disputed points, and asked the pope officially to sanction it. The list was returned, with some changes: the sections that treated of predestination and of reprobation were struck out; other clauses, taken from the Sententiae of St. Prosper (which again derived from St. Augustine), were added. St. Caesarius added- to the list thus revised more matter of his own, touched up the whole, and presented the document, thus arranged, for acceptance to the bishops of his province assembled at Orange for the dedication of the basilica there (July 3, 529). They signed it; and St. Caesarius next sent the document to Rome for ratification. Felix IV was dead. It was to his successor, Boniface II, that the decree came. He approved it, January 25, 531, as an adequate expression of the Church's teaching, and thus gave it all the force needed to end the controversy. Little by little, as the decree circulated, the controversy died out. The critics of St. Augustine had to admit, as part of Catholic teaching, that, even for the first movements of man in the work of his salvation, grace was needed; and that, apart from grace-left to its own resources human free-will is incapable of sustained moral goodness. On the other hand, those developments which had, in part, caused the controversy St. Augustine's theory on the intrinsic malice of concupiscence, on the transmission of original sin from parent to child through the parental concupiscence which the act of generation involved, on the lot of unbaptised children, and some of his ideas regarding predestination-none of these were approved. The Augustinian doctrine, as against Pelagius, was fully confirmed. On the other hand the controversy had brought out clearly that others of the saint's conclusions and some of them are extremely repugnant were no more than the theories of a learned theologian: and were not the Church's teaching. The Gaul of St. Caesarius, however, where Arian princes ruled, Visigoth or Ostrogoth, was soon to give place to a new condition of things once the now baptised Franks of the north made themselves masters of the whole country. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, all Gaul was Frank and Arianism had disappeared. The saint's task in Gaul was, however, hardly easier, for all that the princes with whom he had to deal were Catholics. The first important event in the ecclesiastical history of the new Barbarian kingdom, after the baptism of Clovis, was the national council held at Orleans in 511. Clovis was by this time master of two-thirds of Gaul. He had, in a few years, destroyed the Visigothic sovereignty of the south-west and with the victory his new religion, too, had triumphed. "I cannot tolerate that Arians should rule so great a part of Gaul," he had declared; and on his way south he had prayed as a pilgrim at the shrines of St. Martin and St. Hilary. The Council of Orleans was the first event to mark the new national unity. It marked also the beginning of those close relations between Church and State that were to characterise all later French history. Clovis, apparently, had summoned the council; and to Clovis it made its report, begging him to support with his power the decisions it had made. The whole of Gaul was represented, bishops even from the districts still in the hands of the Burgundians. On the other hand there was not a single bishop from the sees of the distant north-eastern frontier Mainz, Treves, Cologne, Tongres, Metz, Toul, Verdun some of which had apparently disappeared in the century of disorder which began on that fatal day, in 407, when the great flood of marauders had destroyed the Rhine frontiers once and for all. With Clovis the 3,000 soldiers of his guard accepted the new faith in 496. The rest of his people remained, for the moment, pagan, their conversion an additional task before the Gallo-Roman Church still occupied with the conversion of the pagan countrysides. The Catholicism of the ensuing century was necessarily a very mixed affair. St. Gregory of Tours, our chief source for the history of the Franks at this time, has left us a dark picture indeed, of a society almost wholly pagan in its morals. Cruelty, drunkenness, debauchery, sacrilege and superstition are its leading features, and Catholicism a thin, scarcely recognisable veneer. The reigning princes set the fashion, their nobles follow it, and in the train of their crimes come blood-feuds and private wars to destroy all security. To add to the causes of misery, the kingdom of Clovis is, upon his death (511), divided among his sons. Reunited in 558, it is once more divided in 561, to remain divided for another fifty years. Between the closely related kings civil war is continuous, and the pages of St. Gregory are a record of revolting cruelties. Good men are, however, by no means lacking; there are saints even, and in every walk of life. Preachers like St. Caesarius of Arles remind these decadent and half-civilised princes and their associates that God is just and the avenger of wickedness in high places. Missionaries tour the pagan countrysides risking, often enough, their very lives, in an endeavour to make the Gospel known. For paganism dies hard, its devotees, lords as well as peasants, resist violently this new "Roman" conquest. Even so late as 626 councils are still legislating against sacrifices, and against Catholics who assist and take part in them. One method of stabilising the spiritual conquest and of guarding against any relapse into the attractions of the old servitude is the substitution of Christian feasts for the pagan saturnalia. Shrines are built in the place where once the gods were worshipped-shrines of the martyrs and, more often still, of the champions of ascetic austerity, such heroic bishops as St. Martin, St. Hilary, St. Germanus of Auxerre. The cult of the saints spreads rapidly. Every town, every village has its patron. He is its special protector and in time of crisis he is expected to deliver his clients if need be, by miracle. It is the age of the miraculous. The lives of the saints are, often, little more than a catalogue of marvels; and the popular conception of sanctity, the test which gives the right to veneration, is the power of working such miracles. In the shrine there is preserved the body of the saint, or, where this is not possible, some relic: not, as yet, a part of his body, for in the West such mutilations are held in horror. " Who dares to touch the bodies of the saints dies," St. Gregory wrote to the empress when she asked of him the head of St. Paul. He sent instead part of the saint's chains. The saints are a coveted treasure. Around their earthly life a new genre of literature grows. First the neo-Manicheans, to capture the prestige of the saints for their sect, and then the Catholics, produce a whole series of romantic histories, with one or other of the saints for the hero. Soon a type is created, a fixed formula of events and characteristics, and for one life historically valuable there are a score of these colourless legends based on a common pattern. The prestige of a town, of a see, of an abbey is not infrequently measured by that of the saint it possesses. Fights over relics are not unknown, and pious thefts. A more permanent influence, possibly, is that the local chapels gain in importance and achieve a first beginning of administrative independence from the church of the episcopal city. The bishop of this sixth-century Gaul is not merely a pastor of souls but the chief personage in the social life of his see city and of all its neighbouring territory. He has the immense prestige that falls to the one surviving institution of the imperial regime, to which men look back, already, with an almost religious veneration. The bishop is a royal officer. Almost always he is of good family; and not impossibly the same see has been held in his family for generations. So it was with St. Gregory of Tours, who wrote that all the bishops of Tours save five were of his family. It is the bishop who stands between the people and the exactions of the king's lay representative, the count. Often the temporal administration is in his hands and he makes himself responsible for public works, for dykes, canals, fortifications. He undertakes the burden of finding ransoms for the innumerable victims of the endless wars, and systematically, with registers, poor-house and hospitals, he provides for the destitute. Especially is he the protector of widows and orphans and, from 585,' no judgement can be given in any suit that relates to them without the bishop's intervention. Another thoughtful council even forbids bishops to harbour fierce dogs lest they scare away the poor seeking alms and comfort. The church itself was a sanctuary, in which the criminal was safe from the unlawful violence of the mob or of the royal officers. Only on their swearing to give him a fair trial would the bishop hand him over. The serfs again, if they were the property of the Church, were to be treated with especial consideration, and the development began which ended in assimilating the serf to the cleric and placing him wholly under the jurisdiction of the bishop's court. Others gladly made themselves the bishop's men by recommendation, free men as well as serfs, and transferred to him their domain. Hence the subjects and dependants of the bishop could often be numbered by tens of thousands. The churches were inevitably increasing in wealth. Generous giving was the great virtue of the time whether in expiation, or from devotion or from interest. The custom of tithes too, though not yet of obligation, was slowly spreading. By the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Church was easily the greatest proprietor in Gaul. Its vast personnel was, by royal concession, immune from the numerous customs and tolls, as it moved about the country on business; and the church lands enjoyed a like freedom. They enjoyed, too, as the lands of all the great lords were beginning to enjoy, and again by royal grant, immunity from the action of the king's officers. On the domain of his church the bishop was ruler, judging and taxing his people; and his own personal subjection to the king was the only link between them and the crown. The property of the Church was inalienable-because it was the property of the poor; of which the bishop was only the administrator. This inalienability, partial at first, had been absolute since the intervention of Pope Symmachus in 513. The bishops themselves enjoyed complete immunity from the royal jurisdiction. As bishops, only bishops could judge them. They made the like claim for their clergy, but, at first, with only partial success. The conflict between the two tendencies went on throughout the sixth century. Finally, in the great council of 614, a compromise was arranged. Civil suits between clerics were to be decided by the bishop. If one of the parties was a layman, a mixed tribunal should judge. In criminal cases if the accused cleric was subdeacon, deacon or priest, the bishop was to judge him: if he was only in minor orders, the count. This system of immunity and privilege was of course always at the mercy of the half-civilised Barbarian upon whose good will it was built. "It is the conqueror who commands. I obey," said St. Remy, the bishop who baptised Clovis, in explanation of some departure from the canons; and the great council of 511, in which that far reaching conversion produced its first effects, laid the foundation of that dependence on the State which was to characterise ever afterwards the Catholicism of the French. No layman, it was there enacted, should be ordained or consecrated without the king's consent. Where Clovis had and of course successfully suggested candidates for the vacant sees, his still more brutal sons imposed them. Gradually laymen, their own brutal warriors, came to be named, and to be consecrated even, without that year's novitiate which the canons prescribed for such cases. The councils protested, but in vain. Saints were never lacking in the hierarchy. More than one paid with his life for his bold reproof of wickedness in high places. But bad bishops abounded; and the pages of Gregory of Tours are filled with the record of these drunkards, debauchees and brigands, monsters of cruelty and avarice, politicians and intriguers. There was no centralisation of the Church in Gaul, no one primatial see. The old predominance of Arles had never matured. The century of invasion, and its division of Gaul into three mutually hostile kingdoms, had broken up the first attempt at any unity of ecclesiastical administration. The councils apart, each bishop was a law unto himself. Rome was far away, and, by now, in a foreign country where a heretic ruled. Communications were more difficult than ever. None the less the churches increased, and religious life within their boundaries. New sees had been established in the fifth century, and in the hundred years between Clovis and St. Gregory still more were added. The development of chapels outside the episcopal city, begun already in the fourth century and then so rudely interrupted by the invasion, was renewed. There were, for example, the private chapels established by the lords of the great estates for their population of Catholic dependants, and there were the new chapels erected as memorials to the saints. These last were at first regarded as the property of the local see and what revenues they possessed went to the bishop. From 511 the clergy who served them were allowed to keep two-thirds of the casual offerings they received. From 527 a permanent funded revenue was guaranteed to them and finally, at the Council of Orleans, 538, the principle was fixed that the clergy of such rural churches live on their revenues. The bishop, of course, retained all his authority, though he is warned not to abuse it, by, for example, robbing the church of its movables during a vacancy. A more serious menace than the chance of such a bishop was the permanent lay patron of the chapel built for the great estates. He was often an obstacle to the development of clerical discipline. Often he kept the revenues, and even the offerings, and in some cases the parish, by recommendation, made him its rector. These rural clergy were simply trained. The Council of Vaison, 529, urges the priest to house and supervise those who wished to be priests. If they are not free men, the lord's consent is necessary. If they are married they must promise to live henceforth in continency, though, as yet, there is no obligation to separate from their wives. The scholastic training is the very minimum. The priest must be able to read, must know something of the chant, of Holy Scripture, and how to baptise. To safeguard his good name the councils lay down a minute code of observances in all that relates to his business with the other sex. That there were abuses and disorders in this primitive organisation is certain-as it is certain that such disorders cause more comment, and leave more trace, than the humdrum virtue of the rest. The brutality of the time finds its habitual reflection in the clerical scandals that are recurrent. Drunkenness, incontinence, scandals from the renewal of married life after ordination, theft and murder all these occur in the indictment. That these rural clergy were, personally, poor enough may be gathered from such counsels as that of St. Caesarius that the priest should supplement his income by manual work. St. Caesarius, himself a tireless preacher and missionary, would have the priest supplement his first primitive schooling. He should, for example, read through the whole Bible four times a year. He should also preach to his people an office so far reserved to the bishop and to supply the less competent with the means, the saint compiled a whole series of homilies. To this live and turbulent Church so large-hearted a man as St. Gregory the Great could not be indifferent. His first opportunity came in 593 when Childebert II, King of Austrasia, became, by the death of his uncle, King of Burgundy too. Childebert, now the most powerful of the Frankish kings, wrote to St. Gregory asking him to restore the vicariate at Arles. The pope readily consented. It would be a means of extending his direct influence on affairs in Gaul and of introducing the much needed reforms. In his reply he goes to the root of the troubles when he asks the king never again to appoint a layman to the episcopate, and warns him that such practices imperil his salvation. The hope of royal assistance in the work of reform died, however, almost as soon as it was born. By 594 Childebert was no more. His kingdom was divided between his baby sons, Theodebert II and Thierry II, and their grandmother Brunhilda ruled as regent a valiant woman truly, who shrank from no extremity of violence and treachery to repel that with which the baby princes' inheritance was attacked by their next of kin. For the next few years this task was her sole occupation. The outlook for religious revival was decidedly poor and the stream of exhortations from Rome fell on deaf ears. The aged queen did indeed pause in the midst of her strife with her rival fury, Fredegonda, to assist the mission of St. Augustine 011 its way to England, but that was the limit of what St. Gregory's patience and piety achieved. His aim was a national council, and he even selected his legate one of his own monks. Brunhilda, needing the pope's assistance in a negotiation with Constantinople, listened with a show of interest and consented. This was in 599, but though St. Gregory lived until 604 the plan never went any further. When the council finally met, St. Gregory had been ten years in his grave and a new religious force had entered Gaul and the Catholic life of the continent. This was the mission of the monks from Ireland, and its pioneer was St. Columbanus. St. Columbanus, the incarnation of Irish monasticisms's uncompromising austerity, was a man sixty years of age when, with a dozen companions, he left his monastery of Bangor in self- inflicted penitential exile. Providence guided the band to Gaul, and in 591 they appeared at the court of Gontran, King of Burgundy. Monasticism was, of course, by no means unknown in Gaul. The pioneer work of St. Martin, of St. Caesarius and the saints of Lerins had flourished exceedingly. Monasteries of men and of women were numbered by the hundred, and monastic saints among the Franks themselves St. Radegonde of Poitiers for example (for whom Fortunatus wrote the Vexilla Regis) were known and revered and a real force in religious life. But the Irish monks were almost a new revelation. The king treated them kindly, edified by the miracle of their surviving such austerities, and gave them site after site in the wild abandoned mountain country of the Vosges. There they founded successively the monasteries of Annegray, Luxeuil and Fontaines. Presently this deserted corner of Gaul became a centre of the most amazing spiritual revival. The new monks were the most zealous of apostles, the most terrifying of preachers. They knew no other desire than to win souls from sin, and presently disciples flocked in by the hundred. Presently too their troubles began, for trouble was inevitable once these saints turned to save the souls of the kings and their courts. Their blunt rebuke of the customary sexual licentiousness lost them their first patron. Next there was trouble with the local bishops. Monasteries in Gaul, as universally throughout the continental churches since the Council of Chalcedon, 451, were subject to the local bishop. The Irish monks brought with them a very different tradition. Also they brought their own local customs in such matters as the date of the feast of Easter, which was the centre of the year's liturgical cycle. The disputes ended with the condemnation of St. Columbanus by a synod of bishops (600). Whereupon he wrote the famous letter to St. Gregory in which, among other matters, with the blunt direct speech characteristic of his whole activity he rebuked the pope for his approval of the General Council of 553. No one escaped this new, hardy, undiplomatic, if not too well informed, sincerity, whether the kings for their animality, the bishops for their servile connivance at the royal sins, the very pope himself for his orthodoxy! The day came when kings and bishops united and the fearless monk, after twenty years of labour in Burgundy, was driven forth. For three years he wandered Paris, the west of France (Neustria), the Rhine valley, Mainz, Zurich, Bregenz-sowing monasteries as he passed, and finally came to Bobbio where, under Lombard protection, he founded the most famous of all his abbeys, and there in 615 he died, an old man of eighty-five. His vigorous missionary spirit survived in all his abbeys, and in the century which followed they continued to be centres from which, year by year, missionaries pushed out ever further into the hitherto untroubled Paganism of the German lands. St. Gregory had met with little success in Gaul. In Spain, however, his lifetime saw the great change of the conversion of the royal family to Catholicism. Ever since their first occupation of Spain, in the early fifth century, the Visigoths had clung to their own old-fashioned heresy, the vague Arianism of the Council of Rimini (359). Of their relations with their Catholic subjects during the fifth century we know very little, except that Euric (485), towards its end, for political reasons, persecuted them more or less. With the end of that century, and the Visigothic conquest of the north-east of Spain, Catholicism began to know peace once more. The custom of provincial councils was revived, and once again relations with Rome were renewed. These councils make hardly any reference to the Arians or to their Arian sovereign. Their one positive achievement is the development of the primacy of Toledo, and the establishment of a single liturgical observance. In 552 the empire once more reappeared, after a hundred and fifty years, called in by rebels. Justinian's armies, fresh from the reconquest of Italy and Africa, regained a great part of the provinces of Baetica and Carthagena and henceforward, almost until the Mahometans swept all into a common oblivion, a Byzantine Spain continued to exist along with the Visigothic kingdom. One result of the reconquest was to link, in the minds of the Visigothic kings, Catholicism the religion of Justinian-with treason, and to add to their existing grievances against the Church. These grievances were largely domestic, and arose from mixed marriages; for by this time the Visigoths were the only survivors of the once large group of Arian royalties. The daughters were married to Frankish princes, and on their marriage they went over to Catholicism. The sons married Frankish wives, and the new Spanish princesses remained Catholic, despite a certain persecution. The French wife of Hermenegild, for example, was forcibly re-baptised by an Arian to please her Arian mother-in-law. It was not among the Visigoths that Catholicism made its first gains, but among their neighbours to the west and north-west, the Suevi, settled in Galicia since the time of the great invasion of 407. The hero of the conversion of the Suevi is St. Martin of Braga, and the first preparation for the change was the miraculous cure of the king's heir through devotion to St. Martin of Tours. This was about 550, and it was about the same time that St. Martin came to the Suevi. He was a monk and an oriental, a learned man and a writer, bishop, first of all of Dumio and then in 570 of Braga. By 560 the king had become a Catholic, and the remainder of his court soon followed. In 561 the bishops of the kingdom met in council at Braga at the king's command. What remains of their deliberations is the last evidence of the survival of Priscillianism. Of Arianism, curiously enough, there is no mention at all. St. Martin died in 580, by which time the conversion of the Visigoths, too, was in operation a story whose centre is a family tragedy. Their king, at this moment, was Leovigild (567- 586), an administrator and lawgiver, and a mighty warrior who, before he died, was to destroy the kingdom of the Suevi and make the Visigoths supreme in Spain. His eldest son was the husband of that Frankish princess, Ingonda, whose forcible re-baptism has been mentioned. To ease the family situation Hermenegild was sent, in command, to Seville. There he met the Catholic bishop, St. Leander, and himself became a Catholic. The next act in the drama was a civil war in which Hermenegild, allied to the Suevi and to the Byzantines, attacked his father. Leovigild, in reply, adopted a new policy of religious uniformity on an Arian basis of course and for the next five years (579-584) waged a war of repression. Ingonda was banished and took refuge at Constantinople. Leander accompanied her, and at the capital met St. Gregory. It is from Leander's story, given to St. Gregory, that this account of the matter derives. Galicia was annexed, the Suevi monarchy destroyed, and Hermenegild murdered. Two years later (586) Leovigild died. His younger son, Reccared, succeeded. He recalled Leander, and the bishop was henceforth his chief adviser. The new king wished to embrace the faith in which his brother had died, but he also wished for national unity, and before he made his submission he spent two years in an endeavour to win over his co-religionists. The national Council of Toledo in 589 was the scene of this solemn reconciliation. The king and his nobles and the Arian bishops eight in all made their submission. Two liturgical details of this council's proceedings are of interest. The Filioque made its first appearance in the so- called Nicene Creed, and the Creed was ordered henceforth to be sung at Mass "as is the custom in the East." In this unexpected spiritual conquest St. Gregory had had no share. He was not, even, at the time pope. It was largely the work of his friend St. Leander and it was several years before the official reports of what had happened reached Rome. Of St. Gregory's relations as pope with Visigothic Spain little survives. We have his joyful letter to Leander acknowledging the news of the Council of Toledo, and a reply to the homage of the newly converted Reccared and his thanks for Reccared's present of a chalice to St. Peter. In return he sent the king relics of St. Peter's chains and of the wood of the true Cross. To Leander he sent the pallium, sparing him, the pope gracefully says, the usual admonition to live worthy of this new dignity, "since your good deeds outstrip my words."

THE CHURCH IN ROMAN BRITAIN: THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH, 313-735 St. Gregory's labours for the Church in Gaul had borne little fruit. Owing to the increasing difficulty of communications, Spain was becoming more and more remote. In the third of the lands which had once formed the Roman West, the saint was, however, able to lay the foundations of the most papal of all extra-Roman Churches. This was in Britain, henceforward to be known as England, from the name of one of the barbarian tribes who now occupied it. The saint, in the same time that he began this far reaching work, also gave the Benedictine rule its first great mission, for it was to these monks, from his own monastery at Rome, that he entrusted the task. England, the most papal in its origin of all the Christian conquests, was also the first great stronghold of Benedictine monasticism. One of the most important of St. Gregory's works, from the point of view of his influence on the Catholicism of the whole Middle Ages, is undoubtedly The Dialogues. Its original object was to gather up the traditions of the saints of St. Gregory's own country, or, more exactly, to preserve the tradition of the miracles they had wrought. It was written after his election to the papacy, in the years 593-594, and his own title for it was The Miracles of the Italian Fathers. This is not the place to discuss the alleged credulity of St. Gregory as displayed in this collection, where he is so careful to give his reader the provenance of his information. It is the matter of the second book which is our concern, for this is the primary source of what we know of the life of the great monk who wrote the Benedictine rule. The pope, Gregory the Great, writing as pope the first life of St. Benedict, a panegyric of the thaumaturge and saint, giving thereby an extrinsic prestige to what of itself possessed incomparable value, laid the foundation of the later Benedictine conquest of western Europe. Whatever truth the conjecture may hold that St. Benedict wrote his rule at the bidding of a pope, it is true beyond all doubt that the later commendation of the first monk- pope was the beginning of the rule's opportunity. And the first scene of that opportunity was England. At the moment when England came into St. Gregory's thoughts it had ceased to be a province of the empire for a matter of nearly two centuries. Of what went on in the island in those centuries, of the details of the slow, hardly-won success of the pirates from Frisia, Jutland and the north German coast, of the breakdown of the system of Roman administration, of the relations between the newcomers and the more civilised peoples who resisted them, we know almost nothing at all. These centuries are truly, to us at least, the Dark Ages. Of the Church as it existed in the island in the last century of the imperial regime, that is, between Constantine's conversion in 312 and the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons in 410, we do not know much. There were bishops at London, Lincoln, York and Caerleon, for their presence is recorded at the Councils of Arles (314) and Rimini (359). Like the rest of the episcopate of the Western Church, their ecclesiastical life moved in subordination to the Roman Church, and with the majority of their brethren they fell victims to the manoeuvres of the Arian emperor, Constantius II. These few details, and the names of three martyrs, put to death in the time of Diocletian St. Alban at Verulam, SS. Aaron and Julius at Caerleon are all that has survived in literary record. Relations with the central government of the empire ceased in the reign of Honorius (410) and the next glimpse of the religious condition of the country is the anti-Pelagian mission of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429), at which time, it has been reasonably conjectured, the whole country was Catholic. Twenty years later came the first settlement, in the county of Kent, of the Barbarians who, for a century and a half already, had been the scourge of this most exposed province. With these invasions a period of wars began that lasted for a hundred years and more. The material achievement of the Roman rule was largely destroyed, and with it a great part of the Christian fabric too. St. Gildas, writing a century and more after the events he describes, hands on a tradition of churches destroyed, of priests massacred, of loot and sacrilege, and of a wholesale flight of the survivors. The century in which the troubles of this British Catholicism began, troubles from Pelagianism, troubles from the invasions, was apparently the century in which the monastic life was first introduced, and it is with visits of St. Germanus of Auxerre (429 and 447) that the event is generally associated. He is said to have founded the first monastery, for all that he himself was never a monk, and to have ordained St. Illtyd the first great abbot of the British Church. Illtyd was the master, possibly, of St. Gildas and of St. David the first of whom was the greatest influence in that monastic transformation which is the leading feature of the Irish Church's history in the next century. Another great name in British monasticism is that of St. Cadoc. His first master was an Irishman, but in the monastery which he himself later founded, at Llancarvan, there was formed the first of the great monastic founders of Ireland, St. Finian of Clonard. Such evidence as we possess of the interaction between the monasteries of Britain and Ireland throughout the sixth century goes to show that, despite the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the life of the Church was by no means wholly destroyed. Monasteries, clergy and bishops undoubtedly survived and flourished in the parts of the island still defended against the Barbarians. Even so late as 615 a hundred and sixty years after the appearance of " Hengist and Horsa " the great monastery of Bangor, near Chester, numbered a community of some 2,000 monks. Even in the parts of the island where the invaders ruled, there were still traces of what had been the Roman church, for example, which St. Augustine found at Canterbury. While in the east of what is to-day England the religion of Roman Britain had been practically destroyed, and while in the west it survived and, apparently, became more and more monastic in its organisation, in the north of the island Catholicism won new victories over the Celtic peoples hitherto pagan. The workers, here again, were monks and from Ireland. Voluntary exile was, with the Irish, a peculiar and favourite penitential discipline, the crowning exercise indeed of the ascetic life. As with St. Columbanus it led to the evangelisation of eastern France, of Switzerland, Bavaria and northern Italy, so, earlier in the same century, it had driven others to the north. It was, for example, from Irish solitaries that the Orkneys and the more distant Faroe Islands first learnt of the Gospel. The stories of St. Brendan's voyages are another testimony to the existence, and the popularity, of the practice. One of these pioneers, and one of the greatest, if we are to measure by his personality and the ultimate results of his achievement, was St. Columba or to use his own native monastic name, St. Columcille. He was a man close on forty years of age when, about 563, after a richly varied religious training at Moville and Clonard, and after founding the great monasteries of Derry and Durrow, he left Ireland for ever, "desirous to be a wanderer for Christ." He was a scholar as well as a saint, "of an excellent nature, polished in speech, holy in deed," and with his twelve companions founded his new monastery in the little island of I, seventy miles from Ireland and a mile or so from the great island of Mull in the modern county of Argyll. The kingdom of Dal Riada in which Iona lay (for, thanks to a scribe's mistake, it is thus that we call the island) was an Irish conquest and the people were nominally Christian. To the north lay the fierce pagan Picts; to the south, in Galloway, other Picts converted once by St. Ninian but who had long since lapsed into paganism. Iona was a centre from which other monasteries were formed and the monks undertook their apostolic work. For thirty-four years St. Columcille trudged and laboured, converting the king of the Picts and many of his people. The new conquest was organised after the monastic fashion then beginning to sweep all before it in Columcille's native land. The head of the vast whole, of the confederation of monasteries, the priests, the bishops, was to the surprise of St. Bede the Abbot of Iona, who was himself only a priest. Gradually from the isles of the west the new force spread to the south-west, the Galloway of St. Ninian, and to the eastern lowlands. Nearly forty years after the death of Columcille it crossed the frontier of the Celtic culture, and made its first contacts with the victorious Barbarians from the German coasts. St. Gregory's first recorded interest in the religious conditions of the distant island of Britain goes back to the years between his return from Constantinople and his election as pope (586-590), and it relates not to the desolated church of the Britons, but to their heathen conquerors. It is the well-known story of his sight of the English captives in the Roman slave market. He designed to be himself their apostle, but popular opposition, recognising in him Rome's coming salvation, compelled the pope of the day to recall him. Five years after his election as pope he had another scheme. The official in charge of the papal estates in Gaul was commissioned to buy young English slaves and to send them to Rome, there to be formed in the monasteries as missionaries and teachers. A second letter of the pope, of July, 596, to Brunhilda, makes known that the English themselves had asked for teachers and that, since the neighbouring bishops were utterly unconcerned, the pope himself would find a means. By the time this letter was written, the band of chosen missionaries had already left Rome. Its leader was the superior of St. Gregory's own monastic house on the Coelian Augustine. As the monks made their way into southern Gaul they heard terrifying reports of the savagery of the English, and, discouraged, they halted while Augustine went back to Rome for new instructions. St. Gregory consoled him, gave him new courage, letters to several of the Gallic bishops, to the kings of Austrasia and Burgundy and to Brunhilda their grandmother, and sent him north once more. From the Franks they were given interpreters, and finally, towards Easter, 597, they landed in Kent at Ebbsfleet. Here the king's wife was a Catholic, a Frankish princess and Brunhilda's niece. She already had her priests and a church. The king, Ethelbert, received the newcomers very hospitably and listened to their preaching. By Christmas of that same year, thanks to the preaching of the missionaries and to the miracles wrought at their prayers, the converts were to be numbered by the tens of thousands. Augustine was by this time a bishop, and soon a second party of missionaries arrived from Rome, while the pope, for whom this marvellous conversion was the great joy of his life, strove to interest in it the Frankish bishops too. In 601 he sent to Augustine the pallium, a new custom to mark the especial favour of the Roman See to subordinate bishops, and with it the plan of the new church's organisation. There were to be two provinces. The first should have the metropolitan see at London (Augustine had fixed his see at the Kentish capital Canterbury) and twelve suffragans. A bishop was to be placed also at York, and as the people were converted, York, too, was to become a metropolitan see with twelve suffragans. Augustine, for his lifetime, was to rule both provinces. Slowly, very slowly, the pope's great scheme began to take shape. London and Rochester received their bishops in 604, but Augustine remained at Canterbury. It is interesting to notice that the government set up by the pope is the normal system of metropolitan and suffragans. There is no provision for a special vicar of the Apostolic See such as St. Gregory had recently hoped to establish in France. Nor is any place whatever given to the royal authority. From the very beginning this English Church, the direct creation of the pope, is free of the State. St. Augustine of Canterbury lived only three years to enjoy his new pre-eminence. He died in 604, but not before he had attempted, and failed, to win for the mission the co-operation of the other bishops of the north and west, the successors of St. David and St. Ninian. How they regarded the heathens who had despoiled them, massacred their priests and sacrilegiously destroyed the holy places, we can only guess. How far had they refused to attempt their conversion, how far did they still mistrust the foes only recently so savage? St. Bede, an Englishman undoubtedly, saw in the slaughter of the monks of Bangor, in 613, the justice of God on a church that refused to spread the light. The Irish chronicler gives us the Celtic view when he speaks sorrowfully of the same event as "the massacre of the saints." Ethelbert's protection covered the new missionaries to the very confines of the conquest, and it was in the west, probably near Chepstow, that the celebrated conference between the two hierarchies took place. At first no one of the British bishops would consent to appear. The priests they sent to represent them saw little in the Roman apostle but the bishop who invited them to bless, and spiritually enrich, their bitterest enemies. Even a miracle did not move them. At a later conference, seven British bishops took part and with them the Abbot of Bangor and some of the most learned of his monks. The discussion was long and heated. The Britons reproached the Romans for their patronage of the English and, through the Abbot of Bangor, swore yet again that they would never preach the faith to the cruel and treacherous race who had deprived their ancestors of their native land. By comparison with this strongly worded declaration, the disputes on such liturgical differences as the date at which Easter should be kept, the shape of the clerical tonsure, the details of the rite of baptism, had little importance. Henceforward, for the best part of two centuries, the two hierarchies ignored each other, with what disastrous results who shall say? The Britons refused to share in the toil: they could not rejoice in the success it brought; and for the first few years the success was great indeed. Ethelbert's nephew was king in Essex. Augustine consecrated Mellitus as Bishop of London, and soon, with the church of St. Paul for its centre, a movement of conversion was working strongly throughout that kingdom, too. St. Augustine's own successor was Laurence, another monk from the Coelian. One of his difficulties, too, was the hostility of the British. It showed itself in an aggravated form when an Irish bishop, or abbot, passing through Canterbury refused to acknowledge the archbishop or even to lodge or to take a meal with him. Nor did a letter from the new hierarchy to the bishops of Ireland and Scotland have any effect. Meanwhile the king of East Anglia, too, had become a Catholic for political reasons apparently, for on the death of Ethelbert (616) he returned to his idols, compromising with his newer faith by erecting a Christian altar side by side with the one to the pagan gods. Ethelbert's own successor, his son, was a pagan and so, too, were the sons of the king of Essex who had died in the same year. A general restoration of paganism seemed inevitable. The Bishops of London and Rochester abandoned the seemingly hopeless task and fled to Gaul. The archbishop was preparing to follow them when, in a vision, St. Peter appeared to him, upbraided him, and scourged him so severely that the next morning he could show his pagan sovereign the bruises in testimony of the miracle. Apparently this, for Eadbald, was the turning point. He asked for baptism and for the rest of his life remained loyal to the Faith. Kent was assured if Essex had fallen away. The work of St. Augustine, threatened for a moment with extinction, was saved. It was scarcely more than saved, for outside Kent it had ceased to be, and from Kent it had for the moment ceased to spread. It was from Kent, nevertheless, that the next development came, through the marriage of the King of Kent's sister to the pagan King of Northumbria, Edwin, who now (624) occupied that position of preponderance among the seven kings which had been Ethelbert's in 597. With the new Queen of Northumbria there travelled to the north yet another of the Roman monks, Paulinus, newly consecrated a bishop. York was at last to have its bishop as St. Gregory, years before, had designed. For the moment, however, the new bishop's flock numbered no more than the new queen and her attendants. The king received him courteously and there the matter ended. Victory in battle which Edwin believed to be the result of the bishop's prayers, and the king's recognition in Paulinus of the man whom, years before, he had been mysteriously warned would appear in his life to be his guide, won him over. At the Christmas of 625 the king was baptised and with him many of his nobles and the high priests of the old religion. For eight years Paulinus and his priests were free to labour and, with the king's patronage and the prestige of his example, to reap a rich reward. But in 633 Edwin fell. An unnatural alliance of the Christian British king of North Wales and the pagan Saxon king of Mercia, Penda, was too much for him. He was defeated and slain at the battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, and his army annihilated. His widow fled to Kent, with her children and Paulinus, while the British king laid waste Northumbria. Once more a political revolution had destroyed in a day the religious work of years. Restoration was however to follow, and speedily, but its agents were not the monks from Rome. It was from the north that the new missionaries came. They were monks of Iona. The family to which Edwin belonged was one of two rivals with claims to the Northumbrian throne. He had himself spent his youth in exile, and his death and the flight of his family were the signal for the return of the prince whose father Edwin had overthrown in 616. This prince was Oswald. He, too, was a Catholic, converted in his exile by the monks of Iona to whom now he offered a new field of work that stretched from the Forth to the Humber. The greatest figure of this new apostolate is that of the lovable St. Aidan, who established the monastic centre from which he worked his vast diocese, not in York, Edwin's old capital, but on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, two miles from the rock fortress of Bamburgh where Oswald resided. The work of Edwin and Paulinus was resumed, the preaching, the baptisms, the pious foundations and then, after another brief nine years, disaster came upon the nascent Church as it had come upon that of Paulinus. In 642 Oswald, too, fell a victim to the ruthless Penda. At the Maserfield he was slain and his army defeated. But Oswald's work did not die with him. His brother Oswin, who succeeded, shared his faith and assisted St. Aidan as Oswald had done. Oswin, however, reigned only in Bernicia, the northern half of Oswald's kingdom. The south had fallen to a kinsman of Edwin. Another nine years and the strained relations between the two ended in war, and once again St. Aidan's patron was slain (651). The saint's grief overwhelmed him and eleven days later he died. In the twenty-six years since the coming of St. Paulinus, Northumbria had been converted. Of the remaining Barbarians, the West Saxons had been won over by a third mission from Rome, led by the bishop Birinus whom Pope Honorius I (625-638) had himself consecrated. Mercia was the last of the kingdoms to be opened to the mission thanks to the intractable Penda. But in 655 Penda was slain in battle. His successor was already baptised, and in the next few years the people of the Midlands, too, were brought into the Church. A native clergy was already in being. The first bishop of English stock Ithma of Rochester was consecrated in 644, and in 655 the first English Archbishop of Canterbury, Frithonas, a West Saxon who took the name of Deusdedit. Thus, in a fashion very different from that he had planned, slowly, and with many vicissitudes, the hopes of St. Gregory were realised, within a lifetime from the first hardy expedition of 597. South of the Thames the conquest was due to the monks sent directly from Rome; in the north, the midlands, and the east it had been largely the work of the monks of Iona. It only remained to secure uniformity of religious practice where, indisputably, there was unity of belief, and to centralise the supervision of the different sees. This done, there would be a Church of the English people. Its founder in this sense was a monk of yet a third school of monasticism, the Greek Theodore of Tarsus whom, like Augustine in 597 and Birinus in 635, the pope consecrated and despatched to England. He arrived in 668 to find the most delicate part of the work liturgical uniformity already arranged. The liturgical differences between the Roman monks who came with St. Augustine and the British bishops have been noticed. As the double conversion of the English proceeded it could only be a matter of time before the age-long controversy began to divide the newly-converted. In Northumbria especially was the question acute where Roman and Celtic missionaries had both worked. Bernicia was entirely Celtic in its observance, Deira partly Celtic, partly Roman. The chief point of difference was the date at which Easter should be celebrated, and since the whole cycle of religious life depended on this, and since with this first generation of converts religious life was the foundation of social life, the question was by no means a mere matter of archaeology. Like the Irish Church from which they had originally come, and the still older British Church, the Celtic missionaries in England calculated the date of Easter according to a system devised in the early fourth century, which was, at that time, the system used also by the Roman Church. It was a faulty system and in 447 it was considerably modified. Ten years later the Roman Church gave it up entirely, and adopted the new system of Victorius of Aquitaine. This system it was which the mission of 597 brought to England, and which St. Augustine sought to impose on the British bishops. How they refused it has been told, and also how the Irish and Scottish Churches still held out for the older system in the time of Laurence, St. Augustine's successor. But twenty years later the situation had changed. Thanks to the intervention of Pope Honorius I, the southern Irish had, in 628, adopted the system of Victorius. The northern Irish, however, still stood firm, despite an admonition from Rome in 640. Nevertheless, even among the northern Irish, there were critics of this conservatism, and they began to make themselves heard in the foundations beyond the sea. The dispute soon spread to Iona, and thence to the Northumbrian foundation at Lindisfarne. In the time of St. Aidan's successor, Finan, it became especially bitter when one of the monks, an Irishman, returned from Rome with a new enthusiasm for the Roman practice. The question then was eminently actual, awaiting only the arrival of a strong personality whose insistence should force an open conflict and decision. That personage now appeared, an Englishman, Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, and Bishop of York to be. St. Wilfrid, at this time (664), was perhaps thirty years of age. He was of noble birth, handsome, educated, and he had travelled as few men of his time. He had lived as a monk at Lindisfarne, had been initiated into the clerical order at Lyons, and had gone thence to Rome along with a fellow noble turned monk, the scholarly Benet Biscop. At Rome his doubts on the Easter question were solved and he learnt, not merely that the Celts in Northumbria were in the wrong, but that the Roman Church had introduced yet further improvements into the elaborate system of calculation. He also, at Rome, made his first acquaintance with the rule of St. Benedict which since the flight of St. Paulinus thirty years before had disappeared from Northumbria. Wilfrid returned to Deira, to become a power at Court. It was possibly his influence that moved the king to suggest to the monks at Ripon that they should adopt the Roman use and when, refusing, they returned to Melrose, the king gave the abbey to Wilfrid. A year or two later, in 664, a conference was called to settle the whole question. It met at St. Hilda's abbey of Whitby. The two Northumbrian kings took part, Wilfrid of course, and, among the bishops who shared his views, Tuda, a southern Irishman then labouring in Northumbria, and Agilbert of Dorchester who had recently ordained St. Wilfrid. The Roman chaplain of the Bernician queen assisted and, venerable relic of a bygone time, the deacon James who had first come to Northumbria with Paulinus forty years before. On the other side were Oswy, the King of Bernicia, and St. Colman of Lindisfarne. The debate was decided as soon as the king learnt which was the system of the successor of St. Peter. He demanded if both parties agreed that it was to Peter that Christ had given the keys of heaven. Here they all agreed. Then said the king, "I cannot decide against him who holds the keys of heaven, or when I appear at the gate he may not open it to me." The majority submitted to the decision, but St. Colman with many of his monks, Northumbrians as well as Irish, made his way back to Iona and thence to his native land, to Inishboffin, a tiny island off the coast of Mayo. There ten years later he died. Whitby settled the dispute once and for all as far as it had affected the English. It was from an English abbey in Northumbria, Jarrow, that, in the next generation, the northern Irish were won over to the Roman calendar (688-704), the Picts (710) and even Iona itself (716). The British Church, too, ultimately came in: Cornwall about 705, thanks to St. Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, and Wales from about 768. Within a year or so of the Synod of Whitby Tuda, the Irish champion of the Roman uses, was dead of the plague. Wilfrid was named in his place as Bishop of York and, declining to receive consecration from any prelate less Roman than himself, crossed to Gaul for the ceremony. It took place at Compiegne. Meanwhile Deira, Wilfrid's country, had passed again to the King of Bernicia, and since it had no bishop he named one of the Celtic monks, Chad, Abbot of Lastingham. Chad, who since the great synod had adopted the Roman uses, was himself in a difficulty to find a consecrator. Canterbury, to which he first went, was vacant and Agilbert of Dorchester was abroad (he had just assisted at the consecration of Wilfrid). It was the Bishop of Winchester who in the end performed the rite a bishop whom Agilbert would probably not recognise, since the diocese of Winchester had been carved out of Dorchester by the royal order and without Agilbert's consent. Worse still, as later events were to show, the assistant bishops at St. Chad's consecration were from the British hierarchy of the west. Chad returned to rule his see, and some time afterwards Wilfrid too returned, and finding himself thus dispossessed returned to his abbey of Ripon. Then, in 669, there arrived from Rome the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore, the direct nominee of Pope Vitalian. The new archbishop was reputed one of the most learned men of his time. With him he brought the abbot Hadrian, an African, and Benet Biscop, books, equipment, a plan of organisation, and a live tradition of culture. With Theodore of Tarsus the English Church passes very definitely out of its pioneer stage. His school of Canterbury was to be one of the springs whence flowed the culture of the next two hundred years. Hadrian was its chief, and thanks to the Greek archbishop and this African, the school was delivered from the intellectual sterility that lay over so much of the West. Its intellectual life was real, its mastery of the ancient tongues more complete. Latin was taught as a dead language by the ancient rules, and in the coming centuries English-trained scholars were to return to the continent and re-instruct the semi-barbarised descendants of Caesar and Cicero in the language of their ancestors. The new primate's first task was to end the chaos in the hierarchy Chad was asked to resign York, and Wilfrid was restored. Then, for Theodore recognised the man's saintliness, he appointed Chad to be the bishop of the Mercians, with a see fixed at Lichfield. In 673 the Church held at Hertford its first national synod. The bishops were henceforth to confine their zeal within geographical limits. The free and easy Celtic system was to go. The clergy were to be strictly subject to their proper diocesan bishop, the monks to their abbots. Neither monk nor cleric was, for the future, to wander about as his taste and zeal suggested. In that same year a second see was formed in East Anglia, and the Bishops of London and Rochester were deposed for various misdemeanours or disobedience to the archbishop. Next came the creation of five new sees in the midlands Worcester, Leicester, Stow, Dorchester and Hereford. In the north Benet Biscop founded the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, under the Benedictine rule, and they speedily became the centres of a new intellectual life for the north as Canterbury for the south. Lindisfarne was by this "romanised," and ruled by the monk Cuthbert whose sanctity was later to make the northern see so famous. At York Wilfrid, with all his great energy, was introducing a systematic organisation into his vast territory and, inevitably, making enemies. One of these was his sovereign and when, with the king's assistance but without Wilfrid's consent, Theodore divided the diocese of York, the Bishop of York resisted. He appealed to the pope, and Theodore, once he had left for Rome, judged him to have resigned, and consecrated another bishop in his place. Dogged by the hired assassins of the Northumbrian king, Wilfrid made his way to the papal court. There he assisted at the synod preparatory to the General Council of 680. He won his case, but on his return the king first threw him into prison and then exiled him. Not for seven years was he free to return to York. He used the years of exile to convert the people of Sussex the one kingdom that still remained pagan. Four years after Wilfrid's return Theodore died (September 19, 690), an old man now, close on ninety. Of whatever unity English Catholicism possessed, of its scholarship and culture this learned Greek is the undoubted founder. To none of its saints is our country more indebted. That he treated his subordinates with undue rigour cannot be denied and although, before the end, he made his peace with Wilfrid, the mischief lasted. No more than Theodore himself was the prelate he had planted at York disposed to obey the Roman decision. A second appeal from Wilfrid to the Apostolic See, decided in his favour as was the first, was likewise ignored. A third, eleven years later, led to a lengthy investigation, and mandatory letters from the pope John VI to the different kings and bishops and to the new Archbishop of Canterbury ordering Wilfrid's reinstatement. This finally took place, after violent discussions, at a great council of Northumbrian notables at which the archbishop assisted. Five years later Wilfrid died (709). He had been born in the terrible time which saw the death of Edwin and, as it seemed, the definitive ending of the missionary achievement of St. Paulinus. Now, not only Northumbria, but the whole of the English conquest was Catholic, and not only Catholic but united in discipline as well as in belief, organised on the systematic Roman model. To that work of conversion, and of disciplinary unity, and especially to the extension of the prestige of the Roman See, Wilfrid had contributed more than most. He has a claim to stand here as the peer of Theodore who had done so much to thwart the even way of his episcopal life. There is hardly a better way of realising how much the initiative of St. Gregory the Great did for the heathen conquerors of England than by a consideration of the life and achievement of the Venerable Bede. Here, in an Englishman, born within seventy years of the great pope's death, and within twenty years of the defeat of the last pagan offensive, we are face to face with the greatest scholar of his age, and an original genius from whom much of our historical studies derive. The mere fact of St. Bede is witness to the power of the new monasticism as an agent of culture as well as religious devotion. St. Bede was born at Wearmouth or Jarrow in 673. His parents died while he was very young and from childhood to his death he lived in the great monastery of SS. Peter and Paul lately founded by St. Benet Biscop in St. Bede's time the latest product of the direct action of the Roman See in English affairs. He was a boy in the school, he became a monk. In 692 he was ordained deacon, in 703 priest, and in 735 he died, after a life of uninterrupted prayer and study. St. Bede's works, which fill five of Migne's closely printed tomes, are universal in their content. Like St. Isidore of Seville, almost a century earlier, one of St. Bede's achievements was to salvage and to store all he could find of the culture of antiquity and of the earlier Christian centuries. He writes on the theory of poetry, on modes of reckoning time, on the nature of things, something of philosophy, something of science; He is and in his own view it is the central point of all his studies a keen student of Holy Writ, and a careful commentator. We have forty-nine Or his sermons on the Gospels, and a smaller number of his letters. Also he wrote verse, and though most of this has perished a hymn has survived in honour of St. Audrey, one of the innumerable crowned saints who are the peculiar distinction of this early age of Anglo-Saxon Catholicism. Bede was an omnivorous reader. With the Fathers particularly St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great with Cicero and Virgil too, he is thoroughly at home. As a theologian he does little more than hand on the tradition to the coming generation. For speculation he had, apparently, little taste. Philosophy had, by this time, almost disappeared from the equipment of the theologian, and Bede could say, truly enough if somewhat harshly, that there is no school of philosophy which has not been charged with lying by some other equally imbecile school. There is in the reference, and in others, something like a general impatience with merely human reasoning about things divine. But for all his immense importance as perhaps the most gifted of the band that salvaged so much from the wreck of the ancient world, St. Bede's ultimate importance is of another order. For, besides his innumerable theological and scholastic works, he wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The character of this work, its literary grace, the even critical fairness of the treatment, make St. Bede the superior of any other historian for centuries yet to come. It is the one production of his century that is still alive, the only thing between St. Augustine and the twelfth century that is to-day more than an important piece of archaeology. Of itself it sets St. Bede in a class with the very greatest of the pioneers of scholarship. The scholarship with which, through Theodore, Abbot Hadrian and Benet Biscop, Rome in 668 endowed the English Church, was already producing something greater than its founders. The heritage was secure for yet another generation, for it was a living thing and no sterile pedagogy that Bede in turn handed down to Egbert of York, to Alcuin and through Alcuin to Carolingian Europe and the whole Church.

MAHOMET AND THE RISE OF ISLAM At the time when St. Gregory, still laboriously striving to protect his people from the barbarian Lombards, was finding the great consolation of his life in the first success of the mission in England, a new power was preparing that was to show itself, within fifty years, the greatest scourge the Church had yet known the religion of Mahomet, Islam. Not for the next generation merely, but for the next thousand years it was to be an ever present menace, a factor which would influence every aspect of Catholic development and life. The scene of the new world-religion's origin was the peninsula of Arabia, a curiously neglected no-man's-land where the Roman and Persian empires fought through tributary kingdoms and "spheres of influence." The centre was desert and the bulk of its inhabitants warlike nomad tribes, whose chief source of living was pillage of the caravans that came and went, continually, from Egypt and the west to Persia and India. Along the coast there were towns and a settled, traders' civilisation; to the south an organised Arab state. The religion of these tribes was polytheistic, and of all the sanctuaries the most famous was at Mecca, the chief of the trading cities and the centre of an annual religious festival to which Arabs came from the whole peninsula. Here was worshipped, with bloody sacrifices, a smooth black stone-the Kaaba. It was a brutal and degrading cult. It was not, however, the only religion known to the Arabs. In all the cities there were Jewish colonies, and the vassal states to the north had many Christians among their subjects. The southern kingdom was for a hundred and fifty years a battle ground between Jewish and Christian influences, and the kings were now Jewish, now Christian, in belief. Along the Persian Gulf there were five bishoprics. Few of these Christians were, however, Catholics. They were mostly exiles, either by compulsion or choice, from the Roman laws against heresy and religious dissent, and they brought to Arabia the fundamentally impaired Christianity of Nestorianism or Monophysitism, according to which Christ Our Lori was not really divine or not really human. A further source through which the Arabs had some knowledge of Christian ideas was the professional story-teller who wandered from place to place, charming his audience with, for example, picturesque and detailed descriptions of Paradise and Hell. But, of the Christians themselves, it was the solitary ascetics of the desert who most influenced the Arabs the hermits, and the strange figures of the column-dwelling saints of whom St. Simon Stylites may serve as the type. There are many traces in Arab poetry of the admiration which these feats of austerity and self- forgetfulness aroused admiration, too, for the ideals and beliefs which formed such heroes. The Arabia of Mahomet was the vast central region where the native paganism dominated. It was strongly "nationalist", for it had never known foreign domination. On the other hand it had never known unity, for the tribes were continually at war, and in the cities the rivalry of the clans brought about a like continual unrest. Mahomet was born at Mecca, about 570-580, and educated by his uncle, a wealthy trader and a personage of importance in the life of his clan. The nephew followed the family career, and his business journeyings took him to the West and to Christian Syria. He was already far removed from the primitive Arab cult, when, about 610, he announced to his family the vision that called him to be the herald of Allah the supreme God of his native religion, too long overshadowed by the goddesses worshipped conjointly with him. Mahomet was now one of the many " Hanifs" Arabs, that is to say, who, in their search for a purer religion, had evolved a belief that there is but one God; they refused to worship the Kaaba, had a certain knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, and practised the beginnings of a religious morality. It was Mahomet's first innovation that he was a Hanif who aimed at converting others. His first teaching was very simple. There is only one God, and Mahomet is his prophet. God will one day judge all men, and according to their conduct will reward or punish them everlastingly. A ritual of prayer and ablutions is prescribed, honest dealing and almsgiving are recommended. More significantly still, the wickedness of the clan which dominates Mecca its commercial dishonesty, its oppression of the poor is unsparingly denounced. The first followers were the Prophet's own kinsfolk, and then a great number of the down-and-outs and the slaves. The natural result followed. There was a persecution of the sect and its members fled. A second revelation to Mahomet now most opportunely made known that the goddess whom his persecutors worshipped had great power with Allah. The Prophet was revealing himself as a political genius too. Soon he was back in Mecca and peace reigned once more. It did not endure for long, and by 620 Mahomet was again an exile. Two years later he had found at Medina not merely a refuge, but, thanks to the political circumstances of the place and to his own genius, honour and acceptance as a civic leader. The bitter rivalry of Jew and Arab, and of the Arabs among themselves, was ended by a compromise which Mahomet proposed. All in Medina were to have equal rights. There was but one enemy the wealthy clan which had driven Mahomet from Mecca. They were Allah's enemies too and to destroy them was a first religious duty. Mahomet was now Medina's supreme judge, and the commander-in-chief of its forces. He set himself to organise the temporary alliance and to prepare it for the coming war. The religious reformer disappears for the moment behind the statesman, the organiser, and the warrior. The religious observance is modified. The almsgiving is directed to replenish the war chest, food taboos of a Jewish character are introduced, and Abraham, reverenced hitherto as the Father of all the truly religious, of Mohammedan, Christian and Jew alike, is now discovered to be the father of the Arab alone. He is Mahomet's precursor, and Mahomet's mission is to purify Abraham's religion from its Jewish and Christian accretions. More than ever is it necessary to capture Mecca, for Mecca the one common centre for Arab life, with its superstition and idolatry is Abraham's institution. The new religion is now an exclusive, independent thing; and its immediate aim is the capture of Mecca. This it achieves, in alliance with paganism, by the Holy War in other words by treachery and massacre, with, in addition to the necessary lure of pillage, the promise of eternal felicity, since the Holy War is of all duties the one most pleasing to Allah. By 630 Mahomet had succeeded. He was master of Mecca and of all central Arabia, strong enough now to disembarrass himself of his allies, pagans and Jews alike. Some he exiled, others he massacred. In 633-the year of the defeat of Edwin of York at Hatfield he died. That Mahomet sincerely believed in his mission to destroy idolatry is certain, and it is equally certain that his idealism declined in proportion to his success. Success, indeed, revealed him as the prince of opportunists, a spirit for whom morality had no meaning. Trickery, pious trickery, theft and murder beyond what even the paganism of his origin allowed all these were, when useful, lawful means. His revelations and their teachings are contained in the Koran, a collection made after his death by his secretary and officially published in 660. There is also the sacred book of his sayings Hadith more than a million of them by the ninth century, very few of which go back to the Prophet. The chief sources of the religion are the Old Testament and the Talmud, and there are traces, too, of a considerable knowledge of the apocryphal gospels. The leading doctrines remain what they were originally that God is but one, that Mahomet is his prophet, and that there is for all men judgement by Allah, reward or retribution. There have been other messengers of Allah before Mahomet, the greatest of whom is Jesus Christ, Who, for Mahomet, is everything but God and second only to Mahomet himself. As Mahomet expressly rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejects that of the Redemption, giving the crucifixion a Docetist explanation. His doctrine of the end of creation, of judgement, heaven and hell, is derived from Christian sources, with every metaphorical expression now given its most literal meaning. Heaven is a place of never-ceasing pleasure, where every human desire, even the most lowly, finds limitless opportunity for its fullest satisfaction. A prominent feature of the believer's religious duty is the Holy War to destroy the infidel. "Kill all pagans wherever found." It is not a war to convert, or to impose the new religion on others, but, in the event, becomes a simple canonisation of natural bloodthirstiness and the instinct for pillage. It is the most meritorious of good works, death in battle is better than martyrdom; and in this primitive religion where neither asceticism nor mysticism find any encouragement, "The Holy War is Islam's monasticism." Within ten years of Mahomet's death, his invention had not only overrun the whole of his own country but had conquered the Persian Empire and robbed Rome of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Something must be said to explain some of the circumstances which made it possible for a system so lacking in any appeal but the most lowly to achieve so surprising a success. Islam, to begin with, had made a nation of the scattered mutually hostile Arab tribes. The strong clan spirit survived, but the clan was now the nation and the aggressiveness directed outside Arabia. All the traditional ideals of vengeance remained at its service, given a higher value, even blessed as a virtue, in the new system. Outside Arabia the prospects for a new military venture were more inviting than for centuries. Rome and Persia, the two neighbours, before whose alternate supremacy the middle east had been so long powerless, were, each of them, at the time of Mahomet's death, exhausted from a long thirty years' war. In the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire Egypt, Palestine and Syria the mass of the population had for nearly two hundred years, ever since the General Council of Chalcedon in 451, been waging an intermittent war on the government for religious reasons. They had long since ceased to be loyal to the sovereigns who stood to them chiefly as persecutors. Finally, in this moment of Arabia's opportunity, when in Islam the East had at last produced its reply to the Hellenism dominant since Alexander, there was given to the Arabs a military leader of genius, Omar. Omar's adherence to Mahomet had been one of the turning points of the prophet's later development. He was the embodiment of the reforming spirit of Islam, a man who lived hardly, and used himself hardly for the cause, the proverbial fighting Puritan. On Mahomet's death he succeeded to his place. Palestine and Persia were simultaneously invaded in 634. In each country the Arabs advanced steadily from victory to victory. Persia was conquered in two years, and in 636 the last Roman army in Syria defeated too. After a thousand years of Hellenism and seven hundred years of Roman rule Syria was again in the hands of the East. That same year Damascus fell, in 638 Jerusalem, in 640 Cesarea, Ascalon and the coast. To the Monophysite inhabitants who, despite all that they had suffered, did not play the traitor the revolution was no tragedy. It was simply " deliverance from the cruelty of the Romans." Egypt was invaded in 639. In 640 Heliopolis was taken, to become, as Cairo, one of the greatest centres of Islam. Here, too, the Monophysites went over to the new rulers. Alexandria fell the next year and, to add to the confusion, Heraclius died the emperor who, thirty years earlier, had saved the State after a similar catastrophe. The succession was disputed, and meanwhile in 642 the- Romans evacuated Egypt. With the armies and the officials there went, too, the little that remained of the country's Catholicism. There, for a space, the movement halted, after annihilating the power of Persia, and reducing the empire of Rome by a good two- thirds. In its richest provinces there was now installed this new, aggressive, hostile thing; and of the native population there were none who wished the Romans back. If the movement halted, it was only because internal troubles, and a civil war, had begun to occupy its leaders.

SPANISH CATHOLICISM AND ST. ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, 589-711 The hundred years that follow St. Gregory's great effort, the years between his death and the appearance of the next outstanding European personality, Charles Martel, are years that see an interesting diversity of development in the Catholicism of the new Western realms Italy, Gaul, Spain, England and Ireland now begin their national history. In Spain, from the moment of the conversion of the Arians (589) the Church had a unique position in the national life. It was, very evidently, the only source from which unity could come. So far there had been in Spain two laws, one for the conquering Visigoths, the other for the "Romans." The Church, on the other hand, had never made any distinction between the two races. The kings, henceforth, regularly employed the clergy in the service of the administration. The church councils, now held regularly, and meeting year by year in all the great cities turn by turn, were attended also by the royal officials. Civil business was transacted there as well as ecclesiastical. They became national councils in a very real sense, and a final court of appeal. The Church, with its permanent, stable, objective law and teaching, was all the more important since the monarchy of the Visigoths was elective a political weakness whose ultimate effect was to leave Spain an easy prey to such an organised despotism as the Arabs were, at this time, developing. Church and State in Spain tended to become one thing. It was the king who summoned these national councils, and the decrees passed by the bishops about religious matters became thereby the law of the land. The Church of Visigothic Spain, not unnaturally, was one of the first to produce a body of canon law, the famous collection Hispana. The Spanish Church was well organised. The sees and the metropolitans, too, were grouped round the primatial see of Toledo, and the primacy of Toledo was a reality. It was, for example, the primate who, in concert with the king, nominated all the other bishops. Relations with Rome, if always good, were very interrupted. Spain was more and more at the end of the world. The route by land lay through the territory of the Lombards and Franks and little ordered security, while the sea route, since the Arab advance, was no less dangerous. Certainly the mention of Rome in the affairs of Spain is rare during all this time (604-715). Only eight letters survive of whatever correspondence passed from Rome to Spain. There is one of Honorius I urging the bishops to show greater eagerness in religious matters, and not to be dumb dogs who never bark. There are the letters of Leo II communicating the decisions of the General Council of 680, and two letters of Benedict II (684-685). To Pope Honorius the Council of Toledo, in 638, sent an official reply protesting the virtue of the bishops. To Benedict II's first letter, also, a Council of Toledo (the fourteenth) sent a reply which the Primate of Toledo, Julian, composed. The pope found his letter an acceptance of the condemnation of Monothelism unorthodox in its expressions and desired him to correct his words. This Julian did with none too good a grace. The isolation of the Spanish Church, the long severance of relations with Rome, the civil importance of the bishops, the royal interference in their nomination, were, it has been suggested, beginning to tell. A new spirit of national self- sufficiency was developing. The greatest figure of this Spanish Catholicism of the seventh century is the Bishop of Seville, St. Isidore. He was the brother, as well as the successor, of St. Gregory's friend St. Leander who had played so important a part in the troubles that preceded the great reunion of 589. Leander died in 600 and for the next thirty- six years Isidore ruled in his stead. He had been a monk before his appointment and, as a bishop, he composed a monastic rule. One of its characteristics is a most rigorous insistence on the obligation of the enclosure. The monastery is to have but one door and it is to be well guarded. The monks are to renew annually their vow of poverty. The abbot, three times a week, is to preach them a homily, and the monastic day opens with a distribution of manuscripts for the community to study. This last prescription is what we should expect from St. Isidore, for he was the one scholar of his age. To his contemporaries he seemed the equal of any of the Fathers, as the early writers now begin to be styled, and if he never makes any show of original thought, and quotes very often only at second-hand, it is certain that his erudition was really very great. Never had the authority of the Fathers, as a witness to tradition, stood higher, and-it was in the collection, from their writings, of texts to illustrate and prove particular doctrines that St. Isidore excelled. The philosophical presentation of Catholicism he ignored entirely. Like every Latin writer of the previous two centuries he makes St. Augustine's teaching on the Trinity his own, though he makes no mention of the work of Boethius that was to influence in centuries to come the great medieval scholastics. It is St. Gregory he follows in his teaching that the origin of the human soul is unknown, but that it is in no way corporeal. He accepts the teaching of the council of 529 that grace is necessary for man's very first movements towards God, and that his free will is of itself incapable of sustained and lasting moral good. In the other great controversy which survived from St. Augustine's intervention, he follows St. Augustine faithfully. Predestination is absolute, and independent of God's foreknowledge of merits and faults, Who is "just to those whom He rejects, merciful to those whom He chooses." Children who die unbaptised expiate in hell the guilt of original sin another Augustinian influence without even St. Augustine's apologetic adjective that makes the prospect almost inviting. It is St. Augustine again whom he follows in his explanation of man as redeemed from the power of the devil by the devil's abuse of his power over humanity in the death of Christ. The Church is not an assembly of saints. It does not cease to be the Church because some of its children show themselves evil livers. Whoever deserts the Church turns his back on salvation. The close union of Church and State in St. Isidore's time leaves a very evident trace in his teaching that " as the heavenly kingdom advances by means of the kingdoms of this world, so those who, placed within the Church, conspire against its faith and discipline should be crushed by the power of the State." St. Isidore's explanation of the sacraments is Augustinian in its distinction between the rite and the grace it produces. But he adheres to a much older theory when he attributes the effect of the sacrament to the blessing previously given to the matter used in its administration. It is to the fact that the baptismal water has been duly blessed that the baptised owes his baptism. Only thus does the divine force latent in the sacrament operate. In the debated question as to the validity of heretical baptism St. Isidore, like St. Gregory and St. Leo before him, follows St. Augustine and the constant practice of the Roman Church the sacrament is not to be repeated, for although the heretic who receives it is not thereby cleansed from sin, he is none the less baptised. Such heretics when converted to Catholicism were, in the Spain of St. Isidore, admitted to the Church in the rite of Confirmation. Confirmation, otherwise given immediately after baptism, is an imposition of hands followed by an anointing of the forehead with chrism. Its usual minister is the bishop. Should a priest administer Confirmation the chrism he uses must have been blessed by a bishop. St. Isidore's teaching on the Holy Eucharist is slightly influenced by the Eastern theory that the bread and wine are changed in the Mass, not by the words of consecration, but at the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit's action which follows. As to the use of the Holy Eucharist, St. Augustine, in the heat of the Pelagian discussion, had taught that even children must receive It as a condition of salvation. St. Isidore, who does not follow him here, follows him in his insistence that It may be received even daily provided that the recipient is free from serious sin and motivated by religious devotion and humility. The Holy Eucharist is, again, a sacrifice that Christ Himself has instituted and St. Gregory's doctrine of the power of the sacrifice to atone for the sins of the dead finds an echo, too, in the Spanish bishop. Christian marriage, since it is a figure of the indissoluble union between Christ and the Church, is itself indissoluble. It was to be blessed by the priest and religious considerations had their role in the matrimonial relations. St. Isidore, in whose writings the Middle Ages found an encyclopaedia of human knowledge, is certainly not one of the greatest names in theological history. In the general history of the Church, however, he is more important, for he is one of the chief links between the golden age of the Fathers and that of the medieval scholastics; and he is almost the last writer for four centuries to merit the name of theologian at all. His work has this additional importance, for us, that it mirrors the belief and life of the Church on the eve of the next catastrophe to overwhelm it. The history of Catholicism in Spain after the century which followed the reunion of 589 is not well known to us. If it produced an Isidore of Seville, it had never a Gregory of Tours nor a Bede. There are the scanty records of Roman intervention, there are the canons of the innumerable councils, and that is almost all. The picture we construct from such materials can hardly be complete. For whatever it is worth, it shows us a Church which is in many respects a department of the State. The kings named the bishops, and, in time of crisis, the bishops lent all their religious prestige to the kings. In this sense they were patriotic enough, though we are hardly in a position to decide whether they would not have done better for the Church and for Spain by throwing their influence against the continuance of the elective monarchy. The same evils afflicted the Spanish hierarchy that are to be noted in seventh-century Gaul personal loose living and, above all, simony. One result of the closer connection with the State the closest to obtain in any of those barbarian kingdoms was the almost complete failure of the bishops to act independently of the king, save occasionally in political matters. We find bishops who share in plots and rebellions: we find none who come to their death through an apostolic fearlessness that rebukes the royal sins to the sinner's face. Here the Spanish episcopate apparently falls below the standard of the bishops of Gaul. The bishops suffered as the whole of the Church suffered, and the nation too, from the country's isolation. There was never a Columbanus nor an Augustine to stimulate with the vitality of difference the sluggish evenness of national piety. Nor did the Benedictine rule penetrate into Spain, in all the two centuries that lay between St. Benedict and the Arab conquest. Nation and Church stagnated together, and as they had lived so they fell. To blame the Spanish Church for the national unpreparedness is to reverse the logic of facts, for the Spanish Church was very largely what the Spanish kings had made it. It was thanks to them that it had become part of the nation, dependent on the nation, and therefore powerless to renew its life. One thing alone could have saved Spanish Catholicism and through it the nation effective intervention from outside. By the end of the seventh century, with Spain, Europe and the Papacy as they were then organised, this was out of the question. And it is questionable whether Spain would have welcomed it. The significant fact remains, that the first of these barbarian Christianities to fall was the state-ridden Church of what had been the least barbarian of all the western provinces of the old empire.

THE HERESY OF THE ICONOCLASTS THE century that opened with the pontificate of St. Gregory closed very gloomily. The Lombards, for all that they were now Catholics, still menaced the security of Rome; the churches of the East were once again tamely acquiescing in the imperial defiance of the Roman supremacy; and if England and Ireland, the new provinces of Christ's kingdom, were thriving vigorously, morality and Christian order in the older church of Gaul were in worse condition even than in the time of St. Gregory. Finally, the new power which, sixty years before, had so dramatically conquered the lands whence Christianity had originally come, was once more moving; and it was capturing the West, now, as easily as it had then captured the East. Carthage fell to the Mohammedans in 698 and in the next ten years they were masters of the whole of Roman Africa to the Atlantic. The internal quarrels of the aristocracy in Spain, and the assistance of the governor of Ceuta, the Byzantine Empire's last scrap of territory in the West, gave them their chance. They crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (711) in the imperial vessels- 12,000 men in all, of whom but a poor 300 were Arabs. The chief and the army were Moors, Catholics only a few years earlier. The Visigothic army they routed in one decisive battle, and, victorious, spread like a flood over southern Spain. Cordova, Elvira, Merida, Toledo, were occupied in turn. In 718 Saragossa was taken and in 720 the Mohammedans crossed the Pyrenees They took Narbonne, and though, in 721, they failed to take Toulouse the whole of the south-west was soon in their hands. Bordeaux, Nimes, Carcassonne were Mohammedan towns, and even Autun. In these same years other Arab-directed armies pressed with equal success to the conquest of the East. From Persia, a conquest since the first days of the new religion, they now overran Turkestan and central Asia, the valley of the Indus and the Punjab. Armenia and the Caucasus fell to them and, masters of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Wall of China, they laid siege in 717 to Constantinople. The rulers of what had been the Eastern division of the old Roman Empire, for all that they resisted stoutly, had been for many years powerless against this new force. Heraclius, upon whom the first disasters fell at the moment when he had barely completed his deliverance of the East from Persia, died in despair (642). Constans II (642-668) had the unhappy experience of a monotony of defeat. With his son Constantine IV (668-685) affairs mended somewhat. The new emperor was a more vigorous personality than his father and he held off for five years the boldest venture the Arabs had yet attempted the siege of Constantinople (673-678), defeating their fleet with terrible losses at Syllaeum, and their armies in Asia Minor. It was Islam's first real check and for twenty years there was peace. The next emperor, Justinian II, was, alas, a fool, a half-crazed tyrant, thoroughly incompetent. A revolution drove him out and for sixteen years the empire was given over to anarchy. These were the years of the new Arab advance, of the loss to them of Africa and Spain, and of the Arab seige of Constantinople. The capital was threatened, this time, by the Bulgarians, barbarians lately settled between the Danube and the Balkan mountains. Its deliverer was the military commander of the province of Anatolia, Leo the Isaurian. He marched on the capital with his army and was proclaimed emperor as Leo III. He was to reign for twenty-three years (717-740) and in that time to re-establish order and security for centuries yet to come. Leo III is, with his son and successor, Constantine V (740-775), the creator of that Byzantine State which for another five hundred years effectively staved off the ever recurring assaults from the East. Gradually the Arabs were driven out of Asia Minor, and Constantine V, taking the offensive, recaptured Cyprus and harried Armenia and Syria to the Euphrates. To these two princes, very largely, do we owe it that the nascent civilisation of the Catholic Middle Ages was not stifled by Islam while it was yet painfully learning to breathe. At the same time, they crippled the power which menaced from the west this one civilised Christian State-the half- civilised Bulgarians. These warrior princes did the State equally valuable service as reformers. The process which, in the previous century, recognising the facts of the case, had consciously worked to make of the Roman Empire of the East, a Greek-speaking, Oriental-mannered State, was pressed forward more and still more vigorously. A new reorganisation of the provinces, a new distribution of powers, a military code, a code of agricultural laws to arrest the development by which the wealthy landowner was growing more and more wealthy and the peasant becoming a slave, and above all a new code of civil law it is for this reconstruction of the State, as well as for the military genius which ensured that there should be a State to reconstruct, that the Isaurian emperors deserve their high place in the history of civilisation. They have another, very different, title to fame as the agents of a new religious controversy which rent the empire for sixty years, embittered their relations with the pope, who by this was the sole surviving power in the West that remained loyal to the empire, and which gave to the Church hundreds of new martyrs. This was the celebrated controversy as to the lawfulness of the reverence paid to the images of the saints, a practice which these emperors began to forbid under extreme penalties. A quotation from the classic historian of the empire, Finlay, shows the connection of this apparent aberration with the general policy of the Isaurian emperors and it explains the bitterness with which, from the beginning, they attacked the practice and punished its adherents. " [The period 717-867" /> opens with the efforts by which Leo and the people of the empire saved Roman Law and the Christian religion from the conquering Saracens. It embraces a long and violent struggle between the government and the people, the emperors seeking to increase the central power by annihilating every local franchise, and even the right of private opinion among their subjects. The contest concerning image-worship. . . became the expression of this struggle. Its object was as much to consolidate the supremacy of the imperial authority, as to purify the practice of the Church. The emperors wished to constitute themselves the fountains of ecclesiastical as completely as of civil legislation." Images painted and sculptured representations of persons and mysteries, allegorical scenes, scenes from biblical history, or the liturgy, images even of definite historical personages, of Our Lord, His mother, and the saints, had been used by the Christian churches from at least the first century as testify, not merely the reference to them in the early writers, but the numbers of such primitive images which still survive. It is less easy to be certain that a definite cult was paid, in the period before Constantine's conversion at least, to the actual image for the sake of its subject. With Constantine's conversion there is very definitely a cult of the Cross, and apparently, about the same time, the beginnings of a cult of other images, for already the practice has its critics, and the Council of Elvira in 305-306 definitely forbids the placing of pictures in the churches "lest what is worshipped and adored be painted on the walls." A little later, at the other extremity of the Christian world, Eusebius of Cesarea, the father of Church History, is explaining to Constantine's sister that he cannot send her the image of Christ for which she asks since the Scriptures forbid the making of images. He adds that, having recently found one of the faithful with what passed for pictures of Our Lord and St. Paul in her possession, he had confiscated them, lest the practice should spread, and Christians, like the idolaters, should come to think they could carry God round in a picture. That such reasons should prevail in a time when idolatry had hardly ceased to be the State religion and when it was still fashionable, was only natural. Despite such critics Eusebius did not lack successors the use of images spread, however, and by the time of Justinian (527-565) it was generally established in the East at least, and along with it, but more slowly, the practice of paying a reverence to the image itself. Theologians noted carefully the precise import of such reverence. Thus Leontius, Bishop of Neopolis (c. 582-602), explains (in reply to a Jewish gibe that the Christians, too, are idolaters in their veneration of images and the cross) that the reverence is purely relative; the prostrations before them, the kisses lavished upon them, the place of honour given to them in the churches are directed to the personage they represent. The whole apologetic of Catholic practice in the matter appears here so fully developed that fifteen hundred years of further controversy have added nothing to it. The practice of the Church in the West was, in this as in other matters, somewhat behind the practice in the East. One of the earliest traces of reverence to images of the saints in the West is the reference, in a poem of Fortunatus, written at the latest in 576, to the lamps that burn before the picture of S. . Martin of Tours. Twenty years later than this we have a witness to the custom in no less a personage than St. Gregory. The pope writes to the Bishop of Marseilles who, fearing his people may make an idolatrous use of the statues, had had them broken up. He points out to the bishop that such pictures and images serve as books to the illiterate. Since it is for this purpose, and not for adoration, that the images are placed in the churches, the bishop does wrong in destroying them. Does he set himself against the universal practice of the Church? Does he claim a monopoly of sanctity and wisdom? St. Gregory, in these texts, can hardly be claimed as urging the use of images for devotional purposes. Still less can he be said to oppose it, or condemn it. The practice continued to spread in the West, and within a century from the death of St. Gregory it was as general there as in the East. The criticism from outside the Church did not cease. Besides the Jews there were the Manichees of the type known as Paulicians. They refused to reverence the Cross because they regarded with horror all that it represented. The Monophysites, too, opposed the use, and even the making, of sacred images. Severus, Peter the Fuller, and other leaders of the party have all gone down to history as strenuous opponents of the practice. To make an image of Jesus Christ was to imply that He had a true human nature and since many of the Monophysites believed Him to be only partly human their objection to the picture or statue is understandable. It is not easy to say exactly why the emperor Leo III suddenly showed himself in the role of iconoclast. It may have been associations of his youth, for he came from a province not far from the centre of the Paulician movement. It may have been from Monophysite associations, for again he came from a region where the sect had been strong and persecuted. Or again his opposition may be taken as an example of the anti-Hellenist side of that revival of the East which, in progress now for two hundred years, was about to reach its climax, the century of Mohammedan culture's apogee, of Asiatic emperors and Oriental popes. The cult of the beauty of the human form was one element of the domination of Hellenism to which not all the centuries had ever really converted the East. Now, in a variety of ways, the reaction against that cult was showing itself. One of its fruits, perhaps, was the revolutionary religious policy of Leo III. There was nothing to shock or surprise contemporary opinion in the circumstance that the emperor should occupy himself with reform in religious matters. These were, and had been, his acknowledged province so far as the mass of the Eastern bishops were concerned almost from the days of Constantine himself. The semi-divine emperor of the pagan empire had never so abdicated his prerogative as to be no more than one of the faithful in the body of the Church. Gradually, in all that concerned its administration, he had come to be its head. He patronised orthodox or heretic as he chose, and whom he patronised prospered. He never, of course, pretended to exercise spiritual powers, to give sacraments for example, nor, if he were a Catholic, did he claim to alter the faith. On the other hand he certainly claimed the right to decide the expediency of issuing condemnations of heresy, and to choose the method of condemnation. He never denied the Church's infallibility, but he expected to control the movement of its exercise. He named the bishops of his empire, and when they crossed his path, as to their credit they frequently did, he deposed and exiled them without scruple. When Justinian came to give the imperial law its classic recasting, the Church law went into his code en bloc. "Nothing should escape the prince, to whom God has confided the care of all mankind," he said. Never did any State lay its hand on the Church so effectively; and when Leo III declared "I am priest no less than emperor," he was little more than a faithful echo to his predecessors. It was in 726 that the first edict against religious images appeared. The text has long been lost, but apparently it provided for the removal of the images, and the attempt to take down the image of Our Lord which was placed above the gate of the imperial palace, provoked a riot at Constantinople. Throughout the European provinces, in Greece and in Southern Italy, there were similar demonstrations, and even an attempt to dethrone Leo. The Greek insurrection came to an end with the defeat of the pretender's fleet: in Italy the Iconoclasts were less fortunate. In 730 the emperor advanced his policy a step further. He summoned the Patriarch of Constantinople, Germanus I, to sign a decree condemning the veneration of images. Germanus refused, and was promptly deposed and imprisoned. Shortly afterwards he was put to death. A compliant successor was provided and soon the emperor had a substantial following in the very episcopate. The pope, Gregory II (715-731), one of the rare popes of this time who was not an Oriental, now intervened. He had had a long experience of the Byzantine tyranny in ecclesiastical affairs and, in the days when he was still no more than a deacon and the half-mad Justinian II was emperor, he had by his diplomacy extricated the reigning pope Constantine from a difficult situation (710). Later, as pope, he had been the chief means of preserving the empire's Italian territories for Leo III in the first difficult years of his reign. His letters to Constantinople dealing with the new crisis recall bluntly to the emperor the realities of the situation. The empire's hold on the pope is but a name, and he has at hand more powerful protectors, the new Barbarian princes: " If you send troops for the destruction of the images of St. Peter, look to it." The successor of St. Germanus was threatened with deposition unless he amended. This correspondence must have been one of the pope's last activities, for in 731 Gregory II died. His successor, Gregory III (731-741), took up his policy. Five times at least he wrote to the emperor, begging him to return to the traditional practice, and then, summoning a council at Rome on November 1, 731, the pope condemned and excommunicated whoever condemned the veneration of images or destroyed them. The emperor, for reply, copied his predecessors. As Justinian I had arrested Vigilius in 545 and brought him to the capital, as Constans II in 654 had similarly outraged St. Martin I, as Justinian II had attempted to kidnap Sergius I in 695, and had forced the appearance in 710 of Constantine, so Leo III now sent off a fleet to arrest Gregory III. The fleet was, however, destroyed by storms as it crossed the Adriatic, and the emperor contented himself with the seizure of the papal estates in Sicily and Calabria the main part of that Patrimonium Sancti Petri from whose revenues the popes financed their administration of Rome and the relief of its poor. Leo III aroused another adversary, in addition to the pope. This was the great scholar whom we know as St. John Damascene, in whose writings the theological genius of Greek-speaking Catholicism makes its last notable appearance. To the iconoclast controversy St. John contributed, between 726 and 730, three essays. They defend the lawfulness of making images, and the Catholic practice of paying them honour. To deny them honour because they are material things is Manicheeism. As to the honour paid them it is never more than relative. The varied usefulness of images, as a means of instruction, as reminders of the love of God, and of the virtues of the saints, as stimulating devotion are all set forth. As to the recent legislation, the saint declares roundly that religious matters are outside the emperor's competence. "It is not for princes to give laws to the Church. . . . The princes' business is the State's political welfare. The state of the Church is a matter for bishops and theologians." Despite St. John's reasoning, and despite the papal decision, Leo III persevered in his policy, and when he died, in 741, the new regime was triumphant in the Asiatic provinces at least, and the Eastern church was once more out of communion with Rome after a peace of fifty years. The new emperor Constantine V (741-775) was determined to reduce the European provinces as his father had reduced those of Asia Minor. He is the curiously violent and crude figure who has gone down to history as Copronymos a soubriquet not so impossible to translate as, translated, to print. The accident by which as a baby he soiled the font of his baptism, whence the name derived, was an unconscious foreshadowing of one distorted side of his later life. His accession gave the Iconoclast movement new life. Once the political troubles that followed his father's death were ended Constantine made a bid to capture for the movement the support of the whole Greek episcopate. At a council held at the palace of Hieria (February 10, 753) 338 bishops assented to a declaration that to make images, to honour them, to give them any veneration was sinful. Particularly was this so in the case of images of Our Lord, for such images claimed either to present merely His humanity separating the natures as Nestorius had done or, if they claimed more, they confused the two natures. To make images of the saints is, further, a sacrilegious attempt to prolong their earthly life. All images, then, are to be removed from the churches as things contrary to faith and abominable. Whoever contravenes this decree is excommunicated, and, if a priest or bishop, deposed. The emperor would have gone further and denied the belief in the saints' power of intercession, along with the doctrines which were that belief's foundation the doctrines, that is, of the resurrection of the body and of the eternity of hell and heaven. The bishops, however, held firm and their orthodoxy here prevailed. The decrees of the council were the beginning of a general war on images and on all who venerated them. They were torn down in church after church and in their place were set, for decoration, landscapes and pictures of animals and birds. From the bishops and the generality of their clergy the emperor met with little opposition. They accepted the decrees without difficulty. But in the monks he met a resistance as determined and as prolonged as the Catholic emperors had met in the matter of Monophysitism. Many were exiled, and then the emperor turned to worse penalties. From 761 when the first monks were martyred to 775, when Constantine died, was a very real reign of terror. The monasteries were forbidden to receive novices, the monks were forcibly married, the cult of the saints was forbidden. It became criminal to pray to them, and the very term " saint " was declared unlawful. With the death of Constantine V (September 14, 775) the persecution halted, for his son, Leo IV, though himself an Iconoclast, was by no means so violently attached to the movement as his father, who had been one of its creators. Moreover his wife, the Empress Irene, secretly favoured the Catholics. Leo IV's short reign prepared the way for the reaction which followed, for on his death (780) Irene took over the government as regent for his child successor Constantine VI. The first move towards a restoration of the tradition was the resignation of the Patriarch of Constantinople, as an act of reparation for his former surrender. In his place the Secretary of State, Tarasius, was appointed, who immediately denounced the decision of the Council of 753 and appealed for a general council. The empress agreed and the pope too one of the great popes of the century, Adrian I (772-795). But the first attempt to hold the council failed. The army, largely recruited from the highlands of Isauria, had always been a centre of the Iconoclast movement and it was still attached to the innovations of the first two great Isaurians. The soldiery, then, drove out the council and threatened a revolution. Irene gave way and bided her time. The mutineers were gradually replaced by troops on whom she could rely and, a year later, on September 24, 787, the council met at Nicea beyond the Bosphorus where, three hundred years earlier, the first of all the general councils had assembled. More than 300 bishops attended the council, the pope was represented by two legates and the Patriarch of Constantinople presided. There were in all eight sessions, the last of them on October 23, 787, just one month from the first. The Roman legates, as in preceding councils, were the bearers of a letter from the pope which set out the traditional belief. The pseudo-council of 753, he lays down, is to be anathematised in the presence of the papal legates since it was held without the Apostolic See and went against tradition. Thus will the words of Our Lord that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and "Thou art Peter. . . " be fulfilled of that see whose tenure of the primacy shines throughout the world and which is set as head of all the churches of God. The papal letters were read and accepted; and, in successive sessions, with much citation of texts from early writers, it was declared to be part of the Church's faith and practice, that the saints should be invoked in prayer, that images and relics should be received and embraced with honour. The Council of 753, its acts detailed, was condemned; and, in a final decree, the kind of honour due to sacred images was defined-it is an adoration of honour, not the adoration of worship reserved to God as Divine. It is therefore lawful to light lamps before the pictures of the saints or to burn incense before them, since the honour paid to the image is really given to the personage it represents. The Council of 787 should have ended the controversy for ever. Of the events that led to its reopening, and of the repercussions of the dispute in the distant western kingdom of the Franks we must, however, treat elsewhere.

THE WORK OF ST. BONIFACE While, on the Eastern frontiers of Christendom, the emperors were enforcing policies that threatened to weaken still further this remnant of the old world and to lose to the Church its last cultured people, a new movement of consolidation was, in the West, laying the foundation on which all the external activity of the Church for the next five hundred years was to be built. This was the alliance between the Papacy and the kingdom of the Franks. The agents of the work were the two Mayors of the Palace, Charles Martel and his son Pepin the Short, the Popes Zachary and Stephen II, the Lombard kings, Liutprand and Aistulf and the English missionary bishop St. Boniface. Pepin of Heristal, in whom this family emerges as the real ruler of the Franks, died in 714. Charles Martel was one of his natural children then twenty-six years of age and, lest he should usurp the heritage, locked away in a fortress by his father's widow. He escaped, however, and, in the customary manner, made away with the heirs, his half-brothers, and seized the position his father had left. He showed himself, from the first, to be a mighty warrior, the greatest soldier Gaul had known since the last of the Roman generals. The Frisians, the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Alemanni all these hostile nations of the eastern frontier, felt his hand in turn. Aquitaine, Burgundy and the western Frankish kingdom too, he so thoroughly subdued that by the time of his death (741) all Gaul was once again, after three centuries, really united under one ruler. Another enemy against whom his wars never ceased was Islam. In 732 the Mohammedan armies had penetrated as far as Poitiers. Here Charles met them, and in one of the really decisive battles of world history, he defeated them with tremendous slaughter. In 735 there was a new campaign, the Saracens having seized Arles and Avignon and penetrated even into Burgundy; and in 737 a further campaign in which, again with great slaughter of the defeated, Nimes and other strongholds in the south were restored to Christianity. By the end of his reign, Charles Martel had established himself as the natural political chief of Western Christendom. Against the Arabs he had repeated in the West the success of Leo III in the East; in his own realm he had established a political leadership it had not known for centuries; and, unlike his great Eastern contemporary, he had not been so unfortunate as to involve himself in a quarrel with the Church. So far indeed was he from enmity that he has a place as one of the chief promoters of its missionary activities. "Were it not for the King of the Franks," said St. Boniface, "I could not rule the faithful, nor defend my priests and clerics, the monks and the servants of God. Nor would I be able, without the fear his commands inspire, to hinder the paganism and idolatry of Germany." The King of the Franks was the mission's protector, but the missionary was the Englishman Boniface, and in him the apostolic Benedictine monachism, to which his own country owed so much, now returned to the continent, in the service of the Roman Church that had first sent it to England, to be now that Church's instrument for the conversion of Germany. St. Boniface Winfrid was his name until the pope changed it was born in Devonshire about the year 680. He was of noble birth and he had to fight with his family before he was allowed his heart's desire to become a monk at Exeter. From Exeter he went to Nursling, in Hampshire, and here he came, indirectly, under the influence of St. Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and Bishop of Sherborne, a gifted, artistic spirit, poet and musician, whose school was, for the west, something of what Jarrow and the school of York were for the north. In all this culture St. Boniface was well versed. He became rector of the abbey school and the author of a Latin grammar. He was a scholar; as the time went, a savant; and he was an ascetic too. In 710 he was ordained priest, and then he began a second siege of authority to consent to his desires this time to go as a missionary into Germany. Not until 716 did his abbot yield, and in that year Boniface crossed over to Frisia. Here a one-time monk of Iona had for many years been labouring. This was Willibrord, the founder of the see of Utrecht, to which, in 695, Pope Sergius I had consecrated him, and of the famous abbey of Echternach in what to-day is Luxembourg. Boniface's first essay was not successful and he returned to Nursling. The abbot died, and Boniface had the utmost difficulty in avoiding election as his successor. His heart was still in Germany, and in 718 he set out for Rome. From Rome he returned to Frisia, officially commissioned this time, and for three years he worked with St. Willibrord. In 722 the pope Gregory II recalled him, consecrated him bishop and once more despatched him to Germany, to work this time as the chief of an independent mission. One feature of this consecration has a great significance, for it reveals that desire of immediate control over its subordinates which characterised the policy of the Roman See since the peace of Constantine first set it free to organise its powers. The newly-consecrated bishop swore obedience to the pope in the same terms that the suffragan bishops of the Roman province had used from time immemorial. The consecration was a sign, also, that the new churches of Germany were to be the pope's own personal concern. The pope also gave Boniface letters for Charles Martel, and the Frankish king gave the missionary the sealed letter of safety which was to be, for thirty years, the human means of his protection. For the next twenty years Boniface moved through Hesse and Thuringia preaching the simplicities of the Gospel, destroying the pagan sanctuaries and everywhere founding monasteries, for women no less than for men. Amoeneburg, Ohrdruff, Fritzlar, Bischoffsheim, Kitzingen, Ochsenfurt, all date from this time. He remained in constant communication with Rome, which the death of his patron Gregory II did not interrupt. The new pope, Gregory III, recalled him in 742 to give him the pallium, and declare him Archbishop, and to commission him to found other sees. In all there were eight of these Salzburg, Frisingen, Ratisbon, Passau, Buraburg, Erfurt, Wurzburg, and Eichstadt. Two years after his return from Rome he founded the most celebrated of all German abbeys at Fulda. In 753 it was made directly subject to the Roman See a rare distinction at that time and ten years later its monks numbered 400. There St. Boniface's body still rests, brought by the pious hands of his disciples after the martyrdom which came to him, in 755, in that Frisia where his missionary career had opened. St. Boniface is the apostle of Germany, as St. Patrick is of Ireland, and through the co-operation of Frankish king and pope in support of his mission he is, in a way, a co-founder of the alliance between these two powers of western Europe. But his relations with the Frankish king, and with that alliance, were still more intimate. St. Boniface has a double career. He is a reformer in Gaul as truly as he is a founder in Germany. The religious revival of which the Irish foundation at Luxeuil was the centre had never received any steady support from the Frankish kings. Wherever the monks of St. Columbanus settled, works of piety flourished, morals and Christian life revived, the heathens were converted. But over the great mass of the territory ruled by the Franks the old disorders still went on unchecked, clerical illiteracy and immorality, simony, the brutality of the lay nobles degrading the sees and the monasteries they forcibly appropriated. Despite all the labours of a century of saints, Frankish Catholicism was in as bad a plight at the end of the seventh century as it had been at the beginning. The accession of Charles Martel made matters worse. The ceaseless effort of defence against Mohammedans in the south and Saxons in the east which filled the twenty-seven years of his reign, entailed a kind of universal conscription in the national life. To the needs of the sovereign everything was ruthlessly subordinated, the Church no less than the rest. Its property, its prestige, its jurisdiction and revenues were chiefly valuable to him as a treasury from which to reward the faithful vassal and to secure the allegiance of the waverer. Men little better than brigands, ancestors of the robber-baron villains of the nursery tale, began to fill the sees. Some could not even read. The luckier among them held several sees at once. Other great sees were left for years without a bishop. How the spiritual life of the Church fared under such prelates, drunkards, murderers, debauchees, can be imagined. Recalling it in years to come, and recalling the man who was so largely responsible, St. Boniface could assure Pepin, Charles Martel's son, that his father was certainly in hell, and Pepin could believe it. Against thirty years of such a regime, crowning as it did a century of steady decline, nothing but occasional, isolated, individual piety was left to survive. St. Boniface's career in Gaul really begins with the death of the terrible Charles Martel (741). The two sons who succeeded, Pepin the Short and Carloman, had received a monastic education at St. Denis, and it was in the kingdom of Carloman, soon to become a monk himself, that St. Boniface began his new career. As in his pioneer work in Germany, so now as reformer in Gaul, he acted as agent of the Roman Church. Councils were held, the first for nearly a century, in the eastern kingdom in 741 and 744, in Pepin's kingdom at Soissons, also in 744; and, in 745, a general council met of the whole of the Frankish Church. Vacant sees were filled, new sees founded, the grouping of the sees round a metropolitan see restored. Councils were henceforth to meet annually, the metropolitan was to make the visitation of the bishops, the bishops of their clergy. The itinerant clergy were to be suppressed. The laws forbidding the clergy to marry, to carry arms, to hunt, and providing that they should wear the special clerical dress, were renewed. For delinquents appropriate sanctions were provided spiritual penalties and others too, imprisonment and floggings. In the monasteries the rule of St. Benedict was henceforth of obligation. Other canons dealt with the superstitious rites and survivals of paganism with which the popular Catholicism was interwoven. Sacrifices to trees and streams, the custom of honouring the pagan holy days, magical practices, witchcraft all these still flourished in places, and these councils provided for their extirpation. A much less usual matter was the appearance of heretics. One of them, Adalbert, a Frank, gave himself out as a new prophet, to whom angels had brought relics of an invincible efficacy. He had new prayers, filled with mysterious names; forgave sins without confession; gave away his own hair and nails as relics; and in the course of years had gathered an immense following, and had even found two fools of bishops to consecrate him. The other heretic Clement, was an Irishman. His teaching was of a more intellectual kind a curious eclectic rearrangement of orthodoxy and heresy. The reform council so earnestly desired by St. Gregory had at last been realised a hundred and forty years after his death. But the old obstacle to any real reform still survived. Pepin was no less attached to the royal hold on the Church than the Merovingians whom he had displaced. He was willing enough to see the disorders of clerical life corrected, and laws made to improve the quality of Frankish Christianity, but to the canons which, restoring the hierarchy, provided the only safeguard for the future, he turned a deaf ear. So long as he reigned none of the proposed metropolitan organisation passed into practice. Not even St. Boniface himself found recognition as archbishop of a particular see, for all his reception of the pallium from Pope Zachary and his extensive authority as papal legate. For all his sanctity, and the merit of his mighty labours, he was never, for these princes, anything more than the bishop of the frontier never, apparently, a force in their councils, never a political power never personally intimate with any of them. This situation had its advantages, the greatest of which was the possibility of preaching Catholicism to the Saxons as a thing not necessarily associated with their detested Frankish conquerors. The main strength of the English saint lay not in Frankish sovereigns, for all the value of the protection they afforded him, but in his constant, uninterrupted relations with the popes. At every turn he lays before them his plans and his difficulties, and it is the popes who encourage and console him. These three popes Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zachary are very truly the sources of the new German church's vitality, as they are, also, of what new life came through Boniface to the Church in Gaul. Zachary died in 752 and the saint survived him a bare three years. Before the martyrdom came which crowned his long life of self-sacrificing exile, political affairs in the Frankish kingdom had taken a new turn. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), had inaugurated, between the Roman See and the one Catholic power in the West, that alliance which was to be the pivot of papal history for the next five hundred years, and which was to do much, in the immediate future, to change the type of character elected as Bishop of Rome. In that revolution St. Boniface had little more than a place of honour. He was the greatest bishop of the Frankish empire, and the one in closest touch with Rome; but it was others whom Pepin chose as his agents when, in 751, he besought the papal sanction for the coup d'etat he meditated.

THE ORIGIN OF THE PAPAL STATE It was now more than a century since any of the descendants of Clovis had actually reigned. Since the death of Dagobert (638) the kings had merely succeeded. The power was entirely in the hands of their chief subjects, and since 687 in the hands of the family of Pepin. It was they, the Mayors of the Palace, who ruled, the Merovingian kings only appearing in public once or twice in the course of their reign. So real was the power of the Carolingians that, within half a century, of their first laying hold of it Charles Martel was able to leave the kingship vacant for thirteen years. Pepin, when he succeeded his father, filled it once more, but in 751, flushed with a series of new victories, and, since the retirement of Carloman his brother to an Italian monastery, sole ruler of the Franks like his father before him, he determined to end the anomaly once for all. The Merovingian should be deposed and himself, with the reality of power, have the title also. He set the problem before the pope as a case of conscience. The pope agreed to the abstract case that whoever really ruled should be called king, and Pepin, strong in this ratification, assumed the succession for himself and his family in a general assembly of the nation. The last of the Merovingians was tonsured, with his son, and Pepin was consecrated king by St. Boniface. This consecration, a solemn anointing with holy oil, already in use among the Visigoths and the Anglo-Saxons, was a novelty in Gaul. It gave the new monarchy, from the beginning, something of a sacred character; and in the eyes of the new kings also, it may be, warranted that control in Church matters which they took over from the Merovingians and which they were to develop very strikingly in the next hundred years until it reached to the nomination of the popes themselves. Three years later the anointing was repeated with even greater solemnity. This time, in 754, it was the pope himself who conferred it, and on Pepin's sons as well Carloman and the future Charlemagne announcing, "It is the Lord who through our lowliness consecrates you as king." It was not merely to ratify the act of Boniface that, in 753, Stephen II had made the long journey from Rome to Quierzy. Between the first and second consecrations of Pepin a revolution in Italy had altered the whole temporal status of the papacy, and in that revolution the Frankish king's action had been the decisive factor. It has already been noted how, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Roman popes found themselves faced with the insoluble problem of being the loyal subjects of an emperor who would not come to terms with the Lombard invaders and who yet could not defeat them. As the seventh century wore on this problem grew even more acute. The Lombards increased their conquests until outside Calabria Aquileia, Venice, Rome, Naples, and their neighbouring countrysides were all that was left of Justinian's Italy. The Lombards, meanwhile, had abandoned their Arianism; they were now devout Catholics. The emperors, on the other hand, were the leaders and chief promoters of new heresies, of Monothelism in the seventh century, of Iconoclasm in the eighth. They showed themselves as ready to tyrannise in matters of religion, as willing to harry and even to murder the popes, as they were incompetent to defend their inheritance against the Lombards. Their representative at Ravenna lost his hold on all except the actual territory round that city; and while the duchies of Naples and Venice tended to become autonomous, the duchy of Rome, thanks to the popes, not only remained loyal but, more than once, helped by the circumstance that it was papal territory no less than imperial, it came to the assistance of the beleaguered exarch in Ravenna. It was a curious situation when the pope, whose properties the emperor had confiscated, whose arrest he had ordered, and against whom he had fitted out a great fleet, was the solitary defence in Italy of the emperor's representative. But during the reigns of the popes who were the patrons of St. Boniface Gregory II, Gregory III and Zachary events occurred that brought this anomaly to an end. The Lombard chiefs were, by this time (c. 715), three in number; there was the king of the Lombards, whose capital was Pavia; there were the two dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, nominally his subjects, but actually more than half independent. The king contemporary with these three popes was Liutprand (712-744), the greatest of all the Lombard kings and, as events were to show, an excellent Catholic. It was the new religious policy of the Emperor Leo III that occasioned the beginnings of change. When Gregory II denounced the imperial laws that forbade the veneration of images and banished them from the churches, the creaking imperial machinery was set in motion to reduce him to submission, as it had been set in motion against his predecessors, Sergius I in 695 and St. Martin I in 654. As in 695, the Roman people and the Roman division of the imperial army stood by the pope. The Lombards too joined with them, and it was their army that halted the exarch as he marched from Ravenna to execute the imperial will against St. Gregory. The exarch retreated to his capital, his troops mutinied and in the riot he lost his life. His successor preferred the ways of negotiation and, as a preliminary to reducing the pope, was bidden to break the new, unheard-of, papal alliance with the Lombards. The involved diplomacy, in which the mutual rivalry of the Lombard king and dukes played its part, ended curiously enough in a three- cornered pact between pope, exarch, and the Lombard king. This was in 730. The next year Gregory II died. His successor Gregory III, a Syrian, was just as resolute in his opposition to the Iconoclast emperor and in his defence of Leo's victims. The emperor confiscated the papal estates in Sicily and southern Italy. He cut the communications between the pope and the bishops of these provinces. But against the pope himself he was powerless, thanks to the growing autonomy of the duchies now separated from Ravenna by intervening Lombard territories, and thanks to the Lombard reduction of the exarch's power. The ten years of Gregory III's rule (731-741) were years of Lombard conquest, and the Romans were sufficiently ill-advised to assist the Duke of Spoleto against the king, and so to give Liutprand every excuse he needed to capture Rome itself. Rome the king did not indeed attack, but he had captured four towns in the north of the duchy when Gregory III died. The next pope, Zachary yet another oriental was more diplomatic. As Liutprand marched on Rome the papal policy changed. The cause of the rebel Duke of Spoleto was abandoned. The king promised to evacuate the Roman territory, and to restore the captured towns; and the Roman army joined with his to attack Spoleto. Two years later it was the turn of Ravenna to feel the weight of the Lombard power. Liutprand, master of Bologna, and of Cesena, had Ravenna in his hands when Zachary besought him to spare it. Once more the papal diplomacy, because it was papal, was successful. In the following year (744) Liutprand died. The new king, Ratchis, was equally warlike, and equally docile to the voice of St. Peter. As Liutprand had abandoned his campaign against Ravenna, so Ratchis now gave up the siege of Perugia. He did more, for in 749 he abdicated, and buried himself in the monastery of Monte Cassino an ill event for the fortunes of the imperial rule. Aistulf who succeeded him was of quite another stamp. Before Pope Zachary died (March, 752) Aistulf had taken Ravenna and its duchy, bringing the imperial rule to an end once and for all. He then turned to the towns that lay between his new territories and Rome Perugia, Todi, Amelia and to the conquest of Rome itself. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), set himself to negotiate, and secured a peace of forty years. That was in June, 752. By the autumn the treaty was in pieces, and Aistulf demanding tribute from the Romans as the price of his "protection." Once more the pope negotiated, but this time in vain-Aistulf was inflexible. The papal ambassadors were both of them his own subjects, and the king sent them back to their respective monasteries. The winter passed with the Romans anxiously awaiting the descent of Aistulf's army with the first good days of spring From the emperor Constantine V all that came was an order to the pope to negotiate with Aistulf for the restoration of Ravenna. The Romans evidently must save themselves; the pope must somehow defeat the Lombards and he had no resources-or become their subject, losing the de facto independence he had enjoyed for half a century, and submitting to a barbarian master: unless he could find an ally who would deal effectively with the Lombards and disinterestedly with himself. The pope turned to the Franks, with whose princes, very largely because of St. Boniface, the papacy had been in close relation for thirty years and more. That the Franks should be called in to defend Rome against the Lombards was in keeping with Roman political tradition. Its last appearance had been so recently as the time of Pope Stephen's own predecessor Gregory III, who had made a great appeal to Charles Martel in 739, but fruitlessly. The Frank was then the ally of Liutprand, and saw no good reason why he should make war on his friend to restore Byzantinism at Rome. Thirteen years later the situation was very different. Byzantinism was dead, in Rome and even in Ravenna. Nor was the pope appealing now for its restoration. It was protection for St. Peter himself, his shrine, his people, his city that was the motive of the appeal. Charles Martel, too, was dead. In his place the pious Pepin reigned, and as recently as a matter of months ago Pepin had sought, and obtained, from St. Peter that ratification which consecrated as a religious act the coup d'etat by which he and his family had succeeded to the heritage of Clovis. The pope approached Pepin with the utmost secrecy, using a pilgrim as his agent. Pepin, in return, sent to Rome the Abbot of Jumieges. The reply which the abbot carried back to France was to the effect that the pope wished to treat personally of the important matter and besought Pepin to provide a suitable escort for his protection. Pepin agreed, and in the September of 753 the escort arrived in Rome. It found the pope prepared for his momentous journey, and it found with him yet another ambassador from the emperor. In the very hour when the pope, determined to end at last the dangerous futility of his nominal dependence on Constantinople, was setting out to meet his new protector, Byzantinism had again intervened. The pope was ordered to seek out Aistulf and to induce him to restore Ravenna to the empire. It was then a curiously mixed caravan, where the last of one age and the first of another met, that set out from Rome on October 14, 753, the pope, the imperial ambassador, the Franks. At Pavia they met the Lombard king. The pope made his appeal, the imperial ambassador supplemented it with his own eloquence and a letter from Constantine V. Aistulf, of course, remained unmoved. Whereupon the convoy split up. The Greeks returned to Constantinople; the pope, despite Aistulf's efforts to detain him, made his way to Aosta and the pass of the St. Bernard. At St. Moritz envoys from Pepin met him; at Langres, Pepin's son, the future Charlemagne. By the feast of the Epiphany 754 the pope had reached the royal palace at Ponthieu. Pepin with his court had gone out to meet him, had prostrated himself before the pope and in the procession walked beside him holding his stirrup. The next day the fateful interview took place. The pope and his court appeared before the Frankish king clad in sackcloth, ashes on their heads. They besought him to bring about a peaceful settlement of the cause of St. Peter and of the Roman State. Pepin consented, and pledged himself to restore the exarchate with all its rights and territories. Negotiations with Aistulf were opened forthwith. Pepin began by demanding a pledge that the Lombards, out of reverence for St. Peter and St. Paul, would for the future abstain from all hostilities against their city. Aistulf refused, and in two great assemblies of the Franks (at Braisne on March 1 and at Kiersy-sur-Oise on April 14, 754) it was agreed-not without opposition that the Lombards should be compelled by force of arms. Pepin marched his army across the Alps and laid siege to Pavia. Aistulf consented to treat. He agreed to surrender Ravenna and his other conquests and even Narni, a Roman town taken years before by Liutprand. In October, 754, the pope returned to Rome. Aistulf made over Narni to Pepin's representatives, and waited until Pepin and his army were safely over the Alps. Then he went back on his word. He refused to complete the surrender, and returned to the war of raid and pillage against Rome which had driven Pope Stephen to call in the Franks. On January 1, 756, he laid siege to Rome itself. The pope had already urged Pepin to return and complete the work of his first campaign. Now he managed to send a further embassy from the beleaguered city. The envoys took with them, among other letters, one addressed to the whole Frankish nation, written in the name of St. Peter, "I, Peter the Apostle." Pepin did not delay. As the Frankish army moved south Aistulf abandoned the siege of Rome and marched to meet it. He was defeated and locked himself up in Pavia. Pepin followed and as he prepared to lay siege to the town, once more the ghost of Byzantine Italy appeared. The same high official from Constantinople who had accompanied the pope in the mission of 753 now returned, to demand, of Pepin this time, that the disputed territories should, when he had reconquered them, be made over to the imperial government. Pepin refused. He had gone to war, he explained, for love of St. Peter, hoping by delivering the apostle to win pardon for his sins. The ambassador retired, this time finally. It was the old empire's definitive abandonment of its claim to the city whence it had sprung. Rome was to begin its history anew, independent of the empire which still continued to bear its name. The holy war continued. Aistulf was once more compelled to plead. This time the terms were more severe, and Pepin installed an army of occupation until they had been executed. Frankish officials went from town to town receiving the surrenders and the keys of the gates and then, making their way to Rome, they laid the collection before the tomb of the apostle. The pope was now, through the Frankish king's devotion to St. Peter, independent of any temporal ruler, was himself ruler, in name as in fact, of the city and State in which his see was fixed. A new and immense complication was thereby added to the development of Catholicism in the lands once ruled by the Roman Emperor of the West.

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PAPAL STATE The history of the next twenty years showed how seriously the complication of the Papacy's new political importance could distract the popes from the task of their spiritual rulership. It showed, also, that if they had escaped subjection to the barbarian Lombards, they had by no means escaped the need to fight for their independence. Finally it introduced a new element into the ecclesiastical life of the greatest of sees. Worldly-minded clerics, ambitious for honours, had always been a possible source of trouble at Rome. Now that the Bishop of Rome was in every sense a sovereign prince, there was added the new danger that the office would be coveted by men who were not clerics at all. To the semi- brigand nobility of the little Papal State there was offered at the risk of a riot, a few murders, and the as yet but faintly possible intervention of the distant Franks a prize that might from the mere lordship of some petty rock-fortress, transform them into kings. That temptation endured, to be for the next three centuries a constant factor in papal history. The temptation was nourished by the new hostility between the two bodies who made up the notabilities of the new State the clergy and the military aristocracy. In the last years of Byzantine rule the clergy, through their head the pope, had supplied the brains, and even the more material means, by which the Lombards had been warded off. Now they were in every sense rulers, and the military nobles no longer, even nominally, their fellow-subjects under the distant emperor were simply the officers and chiefs of the clergy's army. Had clergy and nobility alike been guided by nothing except the ideals of the religion they professed, humility, obedience, a passion for serving, the situation would have presented no danger. As it was, the new State, and eventually the Papacy itself, became a stage where presently a half- regenerate humanity strove and struggled in all its primitive unpleasantness. There was, from the very beginning, in the very pope in whom the State was founded, Stephen II, the tendency and the desire to end, once and for all, the external menace to papal independence by making the pope master of all Italy. The event showed that neither he nor his successor, his brother Paul (756-767), whom the same ambition drove, was strong enough to achieve it. It was evident that the new State could not even survive, unless protected by the Frankish power that had created it. The Lombard without, and the lay nobility within, were more than these first papal kings could cope with. Hence a continual appeal to the Franks, and finally a war in which, just twenty years after the first intervention of Pepin, Charlemagne, Pepin's son, destroyed the Lombard power for ever and made himself King of Lombardy. This victory made St. Peter's protector the near neighbour of St. Peter's successor, and the protector tended, by reason of the frequent appeals for his intervention, to become something of an adviser, of a judge, of a suzerain even. The problem that drove the popes to ally themselves with the Franks had by no means been solved: it had merely changed its form. In one form or another it continued to worry the popes through the next twelve hundred years, to 1870 and to 1929; it is a problem they can never neglect, and their preoccupation with it is bound, not infrequently, to distract their attention from more directly spiritual affairs. The history of the Papal State between its foundation and Charlemagne's conquest of Lombardy (754-774) can be told very briefly. It is in miniature what, from one aspect, Papal History will tend to be for the next thousand years. Aistulf, in 756, had pledged himself to restore what he himself had captured. The spoil of earlier wars, Bologna, for example, Osimo, was left untouched by the settlement of that year. Aistulf's death, and the appearance of rivals to dispute the succession, one of them seeking aid at Rome, seemed an obvious occasion for the pope to extend his territory (757). A treaty was signed; the pope did his part; the candidate he favoured succeeded; and he made over something, but only something, of the extensive restoration he had promised. Pope Stephen had died before he learnt how the Lombard had deceived him. It was left to his successor, Paul, to avenge it. The negotiations now opened with Pepin were complicated by the fact that the pope had lately intervened to secure Pepin's patronage for the Dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who were the Lombard king's subjects. Pepin was far from enthusiastic. He refused the pope's offer of the protectorate and he refused also to support the pope's plans of territorial expansion. Whereupon the Lombard king marched against his rebellious dukes, overcame them, and then turned to Rome. Pope Paul demanded the fulfilment of the promises made before his accession. The king promised a part, conditionally on the pope's securing from Pepin the return of the hostages taken in 754. Paul promised this and wrote to Pepin as the king desired. He also sent another letter, to explain that the first was mere formality. Would Pepin send an army and compel the Lombard to fulfil to the letter his first promises? Pepin sent, not an army, but two commissaries; the disputes were settled by a confirmation of existing arrangements, and the pope was advised to cultivate the friendship of the Lombard king. This was all the more advisable in that the emperor, Constantine V, powerless to punish the pope directly for his share in the events that had made him politically free of the empire, master of Rome, and, what mattered more at Constantinople, of Ravenna too was now endeavouring to build up with the Lombard an anti-papal alliance. Nor was this the end of Byzantine diplomacy. It crossed the Alps and, on the basis of a common feeling in the matter of the devotional use of images, sought to draw Pepin, too, into an anti-papal combination. But Pepin refused; as he also refused to be moved, by the pope, from his friendly relations with the Lombards. So things remained for the rest of the pontificate of Paul r. He died in 767 (June 28) and his death was the occasion for the domestic dissensions in the new State to reveal themselves in all their vigour. Paul I, thanks to Pepin, had enjoyed peace abroad; and, thanks to his own firm, not to say harsh, government, peace at home also. The dispossessed military aristocracy had in this pope a master whom they feared. The prisons were never empty; death sentences were by no means unknown; taxes were heavy. It only required the news of the pope's illness to set in motion a whole world of discontent. The nobles saw their chance to regain what they had lost. They did not propose to restore the emperor, nor dared they have planned to laicize the State. Pepin, St. Peter's protector, was still very much alive. It was simpler to force one of themselves upon the Church as Paul's successor. The leader in the conspiracy was the duke Toto, the pope-to-be was the duke's brother Constantine, a layman like himself. The conspirators first tried to make sure that the pope would not recover and then, foiled in this, called in their retainers. By the time the pope died (June 28) the nobles held the city. They found their way into the Lateran and there proclaimed Constantine, who, in the course of the next few days, received in rapid succession the tonsure, minor and major orders, and consecration as Bishop of Rome. All had gone according to plan. The opposition was mute save for one man. This was the primicerius Christopher. He had been the power behind the throne in the late reign, and in the reign of Stephen too. He it was, apparently, who had planned and carried through the diplomatic strategy which had established the papal State. More recently, he had foiled Toto's attempt to hasten the death of Paul I; and, on Toto's army entering the city, he had brought that warrior to promise solemnly not to interfere with the election. Now he refused to acknowledge Toto's tool and realising himself to be marked for destruction one of his supporters, the duke Gregory, had already been murdered he soon fled, with his children, to St. Peter's. There he remained until Constantine promised to spare their lives. In return they pledged themselves to enter a monastery by Easter, 768, and until then to remain quiet. Easter came, they chose their monastery-at Rieti, in the duchy of Spoleto and were set free. But once safely across the frontier it was to the Lombard king that they made their way. He was only too happy to use the opportunity; and presently (July, 768) the exiles were at the gates of Rome with a Lombard army in support. Friends within opened the gates and, after two centuries of vain effort, the Lombards were at last in possession of the city of St. Gregory. In the fight Toto was slain, stabbed from behind, and Constantine fled, to be discovered skulking in a corner of the Lateran. Christopher himself had not yet arrived. In his absence the Lombard priest, Wildepest, who led the expedition, held an election and proclaimed as pope an aged priest, Philip. The feast that crowned the election was barely over, and the elect not yet consecrated, when, that same day (July 1), Christopher returned. Philip's election was quashed, and he was taken to his monastery by the hero who had murdered Toto. The following day an election took place in the customary form, Christopher presiding. The choice of the assembly clergy, nobles and people fell upon Stephen, a priest of holy life who, from Christopher's point of view, had the further advantage that he was weak in character and utterly without experience of affairs. It only remained to punish, or to wreak vengeance on, the survivors of the election of 767 Constantine and his fellow-prisoners. Their eyes were poked out and they were thrust into prison, Constantine after a trial and sentence of deprivation. Along with these unfortunates, Wildepest, guilty of the election of Philip, was likewise blinded, and so roughly was the operation performed in his case that he died of it. Pepin had died this same year (768) and it was to his successors, Charlemagne and Carloman, that Stephen III's envoys brought the news of the events which had resulted in his election. The envoys asked for a deputation of bishops to assist at a coming council where measures would be taken to guard against any repetition of the scandal of Constantine's election. Thirteen prelates were chosen, and at Easter, 769, the council opened in the Lateran. Constantine was cited, and the poor blind wretch, bidden defend himself, was treated with insults and blows and sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery. The new pope and his electors then, on their knees, besought the pardon of the council for having during twelve months acknowledged Constantine as pope. Next, a witness to the growing barbarism of thought no less than of manners, all Constantine's ordinations were declared invalid a decree that went back on the teaching traditional at Rome since the beginning of things, and that repudiated the principle in whose name the pope of a bygone time had threatened to depose St. Cyprian. Finally it was enacted that, for the future, only cardinal-priests or cardinal-deacons should be eligible as candidates for the papacy, and that in the election none but clerics should take part. The laity's share was reduced to the opportunity of cheering the newly-elected pope and of signing the acta of the election in testimony of agreement. Stephen III survived the council of 769 barely three years. He continued to rule as weakly as he had begun, and the only event of importance was the disgrace and the murder of the men who had made him pope, Christopher and his son Sergius. The pope, in fact, tired of his creators; and he found an ally in the Lombard king, offended mortally by Christopher's rejection in 768 of his candidate Philip, and by the. murder of Wildepest. In 771 the Lombard marched on Rome. It was Lent and he came on his soul's business. But Christopher filled the town with troops and locked the gates against him. The pope, however, went out to St. Peter's to meet the king, and Christopher and Sergius received orders to follow. Their supporters, seeing the tide begin to turn, forced them out and left them to the Lombards. They were dragged from the tomb of the Apostle and, at the bridge of St. Angelo, had their eyes torn out. Christopher died. Sergius, less lucky, survived for a year in the prisons of the Lateran and then, half strangled, was buried alive close by. Nor did the Lombard king keep his promises to the pope. This tale of petty insurrection, treachery, outrage and murder is worth some detail in its recital, not only because it witnesses very graphically to the general advance of barbarism within Christianity since the days of St. Gregory and St. Leo, but because it marks the beginning of barbarism's conquest of their very see.

CHARLEMAGNE, 768-814 Stephen III's short reign (768-772) ran out in shame and ignominy. The very worst might have been anticipated of the election which followed his death. That election, however, had a far different result. It set on the throne one of the most capable popes the Church had known since St. Gregory the Great. This was Adrian I. By birth he came of the military aristocracy; by all his life and training he was a cleric; at the moment one of the seven deacons. He was experienced, capable, honest, and in this Roman there re- appeared all the native genius for government and administration. He was to rule for twenty-three years, a length of days not equalled for another thousand years. His first act was to enquire into the scandals which had disgraced the last years of his predecessor, and to mete out appropriate punishment to the guilty. Next he turned to the Lombard king who, with his vassal of Spoleto, was harrying the papal State as of old. Negotiations had little effect, and the new pope appealed yet once again to the Franks. Meanwhile the Lombards marched on Rome. The Franks followed their usual policy. They strove to reconcile the Lombards with the pope, to induce them to abandon their conquests but in vain; and in the early summer of 773, led by their new king, Charles, the Franks invaded the Lombard kingdom. The usual rout followed, but this time the Frankish victory was definitive. The Lombard king was despatched to France, where he remained to the end of his life; the King of the Franks was, henceforth, King of the Lombards too. While the siege of the Lombard capital, Pavia, was still in progress Charles (Easter, 774) made a solemn visit to Rome. He was received with the honours traditionally used for the emperor's representative, and he renewed with Adrian the pact sworn twenty years before between his father and Stephen II. According to this agreement Spoleto, Benevento, Tuscany, Venetia, Istria and Corsica were also promised to the pope. Had it ever been carried out, the popes would have been rulers of the greater part of central and northern Italy; the Lombard kingdom would have shrunk to a mere province. Commachio, Ferrara, Faenza, and Bologna were indeed made over once Pavia had fallen, but before the magnificent promise had been further fulfilled Charlemagne's consciousness of his new role of King of the Lombards intervened. He turned a deaf ear now to the discreet papal reminders and when, in 780, he had his son, Pepin, consecrated by the pope as King of Italy, the act was a clear declaration that the Frankish kingdom of Lombardy would remain in extent pretty much what the Lombard kingdom had been. The prospect of territorial magnificence which had haunted the popes for thirty years was at an end. Occasional and important additions Charles did indeed make to the papal States, but from 780 the convention of 754 and 774 was a dead letter. To the burden of this quite legitimate grievance, events soon added another, for Pope Adrian and his successors. This was the relation of their new State to the power which created it for them. In the time of Pepin (754-768) the papal State had been certainly free from any Frankish interference, and of the title Patrician of the Romans, with which the grateful pope had decorated him, Pepin made no use at all. Nor did Charlemagne act differently until, after the victory of 774, he began to have permanent personal interests in Italy. Then, slowly, there began to gather round the distinction certain concrete attributes of lordship. The nobles whom, for one reason or another, the papal government deprived of rank or office, began to appeal against the pope to the Frankish king and, despite protests from Rome, the king listened to the appeals; occasionally he made recommendations thereupon to the pope. Adrian was a wise ruler, as tactful as he was strong, and in his time, for all that this new practice began slowly to establish itself, he so managed things that the papal independence did not suffer and that, on the other hand, the Frankish king remained a friend. Adrian died, however, in 795 and under his successor Leo III a very different type of personage indeed the difficulties began to show immediately. It was a first innovation that the new pope officially notified the King of the Franks of his election, sending him, along with the keys of St. Peter's shrine, the standard of the city, and praying for a deputation of nobles to receive the Romans' oath of fidelity. Much had happened, evidently, since the last election twenty-three years before, to develop Charlemagne's importance in Roman affairs in the eyes of the Roman Church. Charles, too, has a share in the loyalty of the Romans, since they now swear an oath to him, and he has therefore a very definite if not well defined right of government. Pope and king, in some way, are together the rulers of Rome. And in his letters to the pope the king recommended him to lead a good life, to govern wisely, to put down abuses, to show himself a good pope and ruler. Four years later (799) an attempted revolution in Rome showed how far Charles' overlordship was admitted in practice. Leo III, for good or bad, was as unpopular as Paul I had been thirty years earlier. He was not himself a noble, and it was from the family of his predecessor that the leaders of the trouble came. Trouble of a very grave kind was already preparing in 798, and it came to a head in an attempt to murder the pope on St. Mark's Day, 799. He was set upon as he made his way to the stational church for the litanies, beaten, his eyes half torn out and his tongue as well, and he was carried off to a monastery in one of the less frequented districts of the city. Thence he was rescued, and recovering, miraculously it is said, from his injuries, fled to the Frankish court. He found Charles at Paderborn and besought his protection. From Paderborn towards the close of the year (November, 799) he returned, with a strong escort of nobles and bishops charged by the king to enquire into the business. The conspirators had no other resource than to try to turn the enquiry into a trial of the pope. The details of the proceedings are lost, but no definite findings were published and the matter dragged on until Charlemagne himself arrived in Rome a year later. On December 1, 800, there was a great assembly in St. Peter's. The king presided and spoke of his desire to end the scandal. Accusations had been made which no one could prove, and since the pope could not be tried he could not be acquitted. It was the dilemma of 501 all over again and Leo III took the same way out of it that Symmachus had chosen. He made a solemn declaration, on oath, that he was innocent, in a second assembly called for the purpose on December 23. It was perhaps hardly a satisfactory conclusion to the affair and the circumstances of the king's presence gave it quite possibly the appearance of being done at the bidding of the all powerful lord of the Western world. For that, by this time, Charles indeed was. Two days later was Christmas Day, and as the king knelt before the shrine of the Apostle at mass, the pope placed a crown on his head while the choir acclaimed him emperor of the Romans. The deed had been done which was to haunt the imagination of the next five hundred years; the pope, so it came to be considered, had made the King of the Franks into the Roman Emperor. This it was whatever the realities which, in the mind of Leo III and Charlemagne, underlay that astonishing gesture which never left the popular imagination, the pope creating the new power and bestowing it upon the Frankish kings, the all powerful king kneeling before the pope to receive it. That Charles was not well pleased at the manner in which there came to him whatever the ceremony was meant to convey, that he had already had it in mind to acquire it through marriage with the Empress Irene-in whom, at the moment, the line of Augustus and Constantine and Justinian was represented may well be. What was done was done and, from the very lack of definition in the doing, it acquired all the more easily the name of being what it appeared to be. Two questions suggest themselves. Whom was it that the pope crowned, and what affect had the ceremony on the relations between the Frankish kings and the papal monarchy which, already, were developing so rapidly in the direction of patronage and subordination. Charlemagne was the greatest figure the West had seen since Julius Caesar himself. He is of the line of Alexander and Napoleon, and the memory of what he was and what he achieved never faded from the memory of the Middle Ages, but remained to be always, in some respects, its most powerful inspiration. He was, to begin with, the mightiest warrior of his warlike family. He completed his father's work in Aquitaine; and, beyond the Pyrenees, after years of fighting, made himself master of Spain as far as the Ebro. In Italy, to his conquests of 774 he added those of the southernmost Lombard duchy of Benevento and for a time Venice and Dalmatia too acknowledged his suzerainty. His most permanent work was, however, in Germany. Bavaria now lost its semi-independent status, and after several failures he finally penetrated into the heart of Hungary, breaking the power of the Avars, a savage Hun-like people, nomads and plunderers, who for centuries had been the terror of their western neighbours. Finally, after thirty years of endless war, he mastered once and for all the Saxons, a trouble to the Franks since early Merovingian times. For thirteen years (772- 785) the history of the eastern frontier is a monotonous alternation of Frankish conquest, with the establishment of churches and abbeys in its wake, and Saxon risings in which all the civilising work of Charlemagne goes up in flame while priests and monks are murdered. The Frank's revenge was as brutal as its provocation. On one occasion as many as four thousand Saxons were beheaded in a single execution while he looked on. In the end he was master, and within a generation the Saxons, dragooned into Catholicism, compelled by force to receive baptism, were a Catholic people. When Charlemagne died, in 814, the whole of Western Europe that was Christian was again united under a single ruler, save for the British Isles and the remnants of Byzantine Italy. This vast domain was not a mere congeries of widely differing peoples. Charlemagne was not the mere brutal soldier Charles Martel had been. He was a political idealist, and his empire was an ordered attempt to realise his ideals. He was educated, and his personal enthusiasm for learning never slackened throughout his long life. One of his favourite books was St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, and the State Charlemagne created was a very real attempt to organise the City of God on earth. For the first time in its history the Church had found a political genius wholly devoted to the task of realising the ideals of the Gospel. The State was to be the means of gaining the world for Christ, Charlemagne the immediate successor of St. Boniface. Never before, and certainly never since, has Catholicism been so identified with a political regime, and this not in order to serve the political ends of the regime but to be its inspiration and to direct it. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Charlemagne, in the last thirty years of his life, is the Catholic Church. He is the one human being on whose energy and good-will and loyalty the well- being of all depends. In 779 he reorganised the hierarchy and, reversing his father's policy, adopted the system of metropolitans planned years before by St. Boniface a conversion to ecclesiastical tradition due to Pope Adrian's gift of the collection of canons made by Denis the Short. The ancient sees were restored; and upon Mainz, and Salzburg, too, the pope now conferred metropolitan rights. The boundaries of the sees were strictly defined, and all monasteries subjected to the local bishop. At every turn the civil law came to the bishop's assistance, strengthening his hand for the correction of evildoers, whether clerics who lived unseemly lives or hunted, or laity who ignored say, the laws of fasting or who neglected to receive the sacraments. The same law, however, admonished and corrected the bishop, also; and it was the king, source of the law, who continued to name, absolutely, bishops and metropolitans alike. For all that the State was at the service of the Gospel, the ministers of the Gospel were by no means independent in their mission. The ideal of St. Amhrose was, even now, only partly realised. The decisions of synods and ecclesiastical councils had indeed the force of law, but the emperor too, when he chose, would legislate in ecclesiastical matters. Fortunately, from the point of view of the entente between Charles and the two popes with whom he had to deal (Adrian I and Leo III) the ecclesiastical affairs of his day were almost entirely matters of administration. How Catholicism would have fared had some great dispute on doctrine flared, and had Charles determined to decide it in the fashion traditional at Constantinople, is matter for speculation, but no more. For centuries before his time, in all the lands he now governed, the different kings had laid hands on ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the protests of the Church had gone unheeded. Much might be forgiven to Charlemagne, continuing the practice, since Charlemagne's ideals were those of the best of bishops and since despite occasional bad failures in his own life he was so whole-hearted in his loyalty to his ideals. The clergy now played a greater part than ever before in the civil life of the empire. They provided all the chief officials of the highly organised civil service and the imperial diplomacy. These clerical ministers and officials were by no means always priests, though benefices were liberally showered on them, nor were they necessarily clerical in their way of life. Thus one of the king's chief ministers, Angilbert, was the Abbot of St. Riquier. He did much for the abbey, extending its buildings, enriching its library. He was one of the band of the court's literary men, as celebrated for his poems as for his success in the diplomatic missions on which the emperor employed him. He was also the lover of Charles' daughter Bertha and had two children by her. But this made no difference to his position, nor even to his relations with the emperor, who knew all. So firmly rooted, still, were the abuses to combat which St. Boniface and St. Columbanus had given their lives. Charlemagne's own private life presented an equally grotesque combination, with its tangle of wives that needs skill to unravel, to say nothing of ladies who were not even nominally wives. Away from the court, there were, in all the chief towns of the empire, the local bishops. The civil law obliged them to live in their sees, to make regular visitations of the diocese, to hold annual synods. The bishop was obliged by law to see that all his clergy could explain the Pater Noster and the Creed, that they were conversant with the prescriptions of ecclesiastical law and the penitential codes, that they could administer the sacraments and preach. Preaching above all was, for Charlemagne, the most important duty of the priest, and his laws and admonitions to the bishops return to this subject time and again. To assist the priest whose own ability in this respect was small, Paul the Deacon, at the emperor's own command, compiled a book of sermons drawn from St. Augustine, St. Caesarius of Arles, St. Gregory and St. Bede, while St. Gregory's Regula Pastoralis was extensively circulated to serve as a general guide for the tasks of bishops and parochial clergy alike. A further evidence of the emperor's concern for the promotion of virtue and learning in the clergy charged with the cure of souls, was his encouragement of the new way of life instituted by the Bishop of Metz, St. Chrodegang (767), one of the disciples of St. Boniface. St. Chrodegang had been, in his time, a high official of Charles Martel's chancery. As Bishop of Metz he had, later, been one of Pepin's envoys in the famous embassy of 754 to Pope Stephen II, through whose good offices he had, on the martyrdom of St. Boniface, succeeded to that saint's effectual primacy in Germany. He was one of the pioneers of liturgical reforms, introducing the Roman rite and the Cantilena Romana which later ages called the Gregorian Chant. But his most striking innovation was the establishment of the custom that, in the larger churches, which were served by a number of priests, the clergy should live a life in common under a rule. They gave up their private property, but retained the use of it personally. They kept also their hierarchical rank, priest, deacon, minor cleric. They assisted as a body at the daily church offices, were bound to receive Holy Communion on Sundays and feasts, to confess their sins twice annually. The rule made provision for systematic study, and it provided for a public correction of faults. the association took in all that vast personnel of clerics who made up the household of the Carolingian bishop, and also the boys and youths who were destined for the ecclesiastical state. It provided for grammar schools, seminary and chapter. Such an institution could not but appeal to Charlemagne, and he did much to encourage other bishops to adopt it. For monks as monks the emperor had less favour. What monks there were, he strove to unite into a single system and one of his laws imposes the Benedictine rule on all monasteries, the emperor, with characteristic care, sending in 787 to Monte Cassino for an authentic copy of the rule. It was piety informed by doctrine that was the quality dearest to Charlemagne's heart in ecclesiastics; the emperor, inevitably, once more the patron and protector of the clergy who were its agents. From the beginning of his reign he realised the degree to which Frankish Gaul was intellectually barbarous, and setting himself to attract the best minds of the day to the work of educating his clergy he turned to the country whence St. Boniface had come. One of St. Bede's pupils, Egbert, promoted to be Archbishop of York, had founded there the school which, at the time of Charlemagne's accession, was the intellectual centre of Europe. It was Egbert's pupil Alcuin, head of the school of York and the greatest scholar of his time, whom Charlemagne now persuaded to settle in Gaul. From Italy he brought Peter of Pisa and Paul Warnefrid, the historian of the Lombards. Spain was represented by Theodulf, whom Charles made Bishop of Orleans, a poet whose memory has outlasted much else if only because of the place of one of his hymns, Gloria laus et honor, in the liturgy of Holy Week. The first of the schools through which these carefully gathered men of letters worked upon the new Christendom, was the imperial court itself. Set lectures, conversation classes, intellectual games in which Charlemagne's own determined enthusiasm led unflaggingly, were some of the means. And wherever the emperor went, there, too, went the imperial school. Moreover, each see, each monastery, each parish was commanded to have its school. Of the monastic schools Tours, where Alcuin himself was abbot, was the greatest. It developed into a kind of training school, whence teachers went out to revive the intellectual life of other abbeys and sees. Fulda too, the foundation of St. Boniface, bore testimony in its new intellectual strength to the scholarship which was its own founder's first title to recognition, and to the zeal for learning which he never lost and which the continual stream of missionary monks from England kept continuously alive in the heart of Germany. From Fulda came the leading intellectuals of the first quarter of the ninth century, Eginhard who was Charlemagne's biographer, Walafrid Strabo, and Rabanus Maurus. Charles, as part of his great scheme of Christian restoration, gave force of law to all the reforms which St. Boniface had so desiderated. He showed himself equally the heir of the saint in his zeal to capture for the Gospel the still heathen tribes of the north and east. Under his patronage, protected by his power, the work of the mission went steadily forward. The Slavs then settled in central Germany, the Frisians at whose hands St. Boniface had met his death, the Saxons as far as the Elbe, the Slavs of Carinthia, and even the Avars, turn by turn submitted, often to the none too happy combination of Frankish political necessity and the disinterested zeal of the children of St. Boniface. By the time Charlemagne died, the frontier of the advance of Catholicism lay many miles ahead of the political frontier of his empire. Against this policy which made loyalty to the empire and to Catholicism one thing, with its practical sequel of forcible baptism, all that was best in the life of the time protested. The Patriarch of Aquileia was able to induce the emperor's eldest son Pepin, the King of Italy, to put no compulsion of this sort upon the Avars whom he had recently conquered (796). They were, in the mass, ready to embrace Catholicism, and from the Danube to the Adriatic a vast campaign of instruction now opened in preparation for their baptism. Alcuin lent all his prestige to second the efforts of these frontier bishops in the delicate task of preserving the purity of faith from the taint of political policy. Tithes, he had heard, were destroying the faith of the Saxons. A bishop should not be chiefly famous for his severity in exacting such dues. And though baptism might be forcibly performed on the unwilling, faith was another matter. Such gifts of God came through prayer. Nor should the rigour of the Church's penitential code be applied to the letter, in the case of newly-converted peoples. In what measure the spirit of Alcuin and Paulinus of Aquileia prevailed, in general, over the barbarian ruthlessness of Charles it is not possible to say. The incidents serve to illustrate, yet once again, the mortal danger to the Faith whenever zeal for its propaganda is inspired by any spirit less pure than that of the Faith itself. It was not the only way in which the magnificent protectorship of Charles, and the incredible scale of his success, threatened the life of the Church. Like his grandfather before him, he treated all Church property as his own. The abbeys, which the policy of St. Boniface had tended to save from the terrible episcopate of his day by exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local bishop, Charlemagne riveted to that jurisdiction more closely than ever. Again, like his grandfather, he used abbatial nominations for the custom that the monks elected their abbot had disappeared entirely to reward faithful service to the State. Abbeys were given to clerics who were not monks, and even to laymen. The abbot and the bishop too had to bear his share of the imperial burden. St. Boniface had fought against the abuse that clerics bore arms. Now the emperor ordained the use of arms as a duty. In time of war the abbot or bishop was to join the army at the head of the fully equipped troop that was his quota to the forces. The abbeys of Charlemagne's time were no longer merely convents of monks, whose lives were given over to prayer and mortification. They were the great centres of national life, functioning in the social organism as the cities had functioned in the Roman Empire. Prayer there was undoubtedly, and much means of sanctification, but around the abbey, attracted thither by the abbey, was all the life of the immense domain which depended, ultimately, upon the monks for the intelligent direction which had first created its economic life and which, alone, maintained it in being. That in the abbey, by the side of church, school, farm, workshops and market, courts and prison there was also now the barracks, was a new development in no wise revolutionary. Christendom and the Carolingian state were for a century practically coterminous, and for half of that time the Carolingian state was Charlemagne. Over the whole vast edifice he presided, as a tradition after his death, but in his life, as a very concrete reality, appointing the innumerable counts and bishops who were the permanent local agents of his policies and the missi who periodically issued forth from the centre of government to inspect the working of the machine and to correct abuses. He was in many respects the greatest political force the Church had yet possessed. As his resources were so much less than those of the three great Christian emperors who preceded him Constantine, Theodosius and Justinian so does his use of them deservedly set him higher. He was an immediate social force of a magnitude they never equalled; and this by reason of his Catholicism and of his close unity with the popes, whom he dwarfed in every respect, who were very much his subjects, and yet to whose spiritual hegemony he was, in a matter-of-course way, always subordinate. How great his achievement in the matter of the extension and development of Catholicism, for example can readily be seen if the state of Catholicism, as he left it behind him at death, be compared with its state a hundred years earlier, at the accession of his grandfather, Charles Martel. Of that great restoration Charlemagne was not the principal agent. St. Boniface, and the multitude of disinterested monastic apostles whom he inspired and led, the Roman popes to whom at every turn St. Boniface looked, and not in vain, for guidance and support, hold here an unshakable primacy. Yet had it not been for Charlemagne, all that great work would never have survived to bear even its first fruits. The immense machine he set up was, however, for all its maker's sincerity, inspired by a spirit that had in it too little of St. Boniface, too little of the Gospel. Its successful working called, also, for a Charlemagne simultaneously present throughout its vast whole, and he strove to achieve this through his legates, the missi. Its permanence called for a succession of Charlemagne's through time and this, fortunately for the religion of the Church, no man could secure. Fortunately: for, with the creation in the West of yet such another system as that which, for now some centuries, had been slowly choking Catholicism to death in the Roman empire of the East, the ultimate fate of the Church must have been worse than even the terrible things which the next century held in store.

THE BREAK-UP OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE, 814-888 CHARLEMAGNE'S mighty administrative achievement was fated soon to perish. It could indeed hardly have been otherwise. In the very heart of the empire he established, forces violently hostile to the new political unity wrestled from the beginning. The social change by which the great landowners attracted to themselves the domains of their smaller neighbours, and with the domains their service and loyalty; the political change which, next, made these great men the lords of their dependants, and the system by which the domains of these lords were exempted from the authority Or the king's officers; all these had continued to develop through the fifty years of Charlemagne's reign. They were now developed deliberately and systematically, as the natural and traditional way of government. The care and the expense of government was transferred from the central authority, king or emperor, to the local lord. The day was fast approaching when the king would have no subjects directly obedient to him but the handful of great men counts, bishops, abbots and in that day all would depend on the power of the king to compel these great men to obey. Another tradition that lived on through Charlemagne's great reign was the idea of the kingdom as the king's personal possession something to be divided and bequeathed like any other estate. Charlemagne so divided the empire among his sons in 806; Louis the Pious, his surviving son and successor, did the same in 817, in 829 and in 835. From all these partitions flowed a series of hitter family feuds and civil wars. The empire was artificial in another respect. Its peoples were too varied and too different and, as yet, too little catholicised- despite the conversions and the work of the missionary monks to form a real unity. It is too early perhaps to speak of French and Germans and Italians, but the ancestors of these modern nations were, in Charlemagne's time, by no means a single united people. The empire was a mosaic of a thousand motley pieces. One thing alone kept it together the genius of the first emperor. The really violent troubles began in 829, when Louis the Pious, in order to give the son of his second marriage Charles, afterwards called the Bald a share in the empire, revised the partition of 817. There followed ten years of civil war. The sons of the first marriage revolted, and were crushed. They revolted a second time and, the great churchmen assisting them, who stood by the old unitary traditions of their master Charlemagne, Louis was defeated and forced to resign. A little later he came back; there were new partitions, new wars; and finally, in 840, he died, leaving the imperial title to his eldest son and the empire divided among all three. The fighting still went on, this time between the brothers the new emperor, Lothair, showing himself weaker even than his father. Finally, in 843, the unity of the empire was once and for all definitely broken by the treaty of Verdun. One brother took the west roughly France; another the German lands east of the Rhine; and Lothair took Italy and the middle lands between France and Germany, from the North Sea to the Alps, called henceforth, from his name, Lotharingia (Lorraine). Twelve years later (855) Lothair died, prematurely; and Lotharingia was itself divided to make kingdoms for his three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and though the eldest brother, Louis II, managed to retain, with the title of emperor, the kingdom of Italy, the greater part of the lands of his brothers was seized by his uncles, the two surviving sons of Louis the Pious Louis the German and Charles the Bald. The Treaty of Mersen, made in that year between these three princes, marks the beginning of France and Germany as separate and consciously different kingdoms. The main feature of the history of Charlemagne's family in the twenty years following this important treaty (870-888) is the rapid disappearance of all its leading members. By 885 three only were left of all the army of Carolingian princes: Charles the Fat (a son of Louis the German), Charles the Simple (a grandson of the same prince), and Arnulf, a third grandson who, but for his own illegitimacy should have been the heir, since he was the son of the eldest son, Carloman. When Charles the Fat died in 888, Charles the Simple was little more than a baby and chaos complete and entire descended on what remained of Charlemagne's tradition. It was just seventy-four years since his death. During these seventy-four years the frontier wars which the Franks had waged for centuries went on unceasingly: with the Slavs, in furthest Germany, with the Avars and, in southern Gaul, with the Mohammedans from Spain. And this century of political dislocation brought with it new enemies, more ferocious and destructive than any western Europe had known since the Vandals. these were the pirates from the fiords of Norway and from Denmark. It was in the last years of Charlemagne's reign that the flotillas of their long, light boats, drawing little water. easily able to sail up the rivers, began to harry the coasts of the empire. The hope of plunder, animal lust, and elementary bloodthirstiness seem to have chiefly inspired these first descents. The Northmen were also savagely anti-Christian, the monasteries and churches the especial objects of their ferocity. In 793 they sacked Lindisfarne, and in 795 made their first raids on Ireland. Gradually their policy changed. They began to winter in fortified camps, off the coasts where they operated, or on islands in the rivers. Soon no river from the Elbe to the Guadalquivir was safe from these pests. England was especially their prey. They took possession of Sheppey in 835, they made themselves masters of East Anglia, destroying monasteries and massacring the monks. Amongst others they put to death for the faith was the King of East Anglia, St. Edmund. They next turned to Wessex, and they ravaged Mercia, and finally, by the Treaty of Wedmore (878), Alfred, the greatest of the English kings, was compelled to recognise them as the rulers of all the north and east of the island. In the empire of the Franks the Northmen established three great centres: on the Scheldt, the Seine and the Loire. Antwerp, Utrecht, Tongres, Cologne, Mainz, Metz and even Aix itself, the capital, felt their power until, after fifty years of this reign of terror, Arnulf, the last fighting man of Charlemagne's family, destroyed their camp at Louvain in the great battle of 891. Just five years before this, the pirates of the Seine had met their great check at Paris, the siege of which they had been forced to abandon after a stubborn twelve months of fighting. The emperor essayed to buy them off with money and an annual tribute, but vainly. As in Germany, town after town fell to them. The west of France suffered even more than the north. From their settlements at the mouth of the Loire, Nantes, Blois, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and as far as Tarbes, were burnt out time and again, the countrysides ravaged, and monasteries sacked until the country was little more than a desert. In Spain they had less success, thanks to the military organisation both of the tiny Catholic kingdoms and of the Arab States. But they penetrated and vexed the Mediterranean even as far as Pisa and Lucca. A century of such savage destruction, added to the desolation of civil war and the absence of organised government, was enough to reduce Charlemagne's reign of order to a chaos such as Europe had never before known. Christendom was fast becoming a waste with, here and there, little islets where a handful of scared and terrified survivors strove to maintain the tradition of ordered life. There remains to be noted yet a second external scourge which, in this same century, menaced the existence of what had once been the Roman Empire and was again to he European civilisation. This was the maritime empire of the Mohammedans of Africa. Here, towards the end of Charlemagne's reign, the internal rivalries which, for half a century, had occupied all the fierce energy of the State, yielded before the family of the Aghlabites. Soon the new order was visible in the appearance of a fleet, the conquest of Sicily and an endless harrying of the coasts of Italy and southern Gaul. Like the northern invaders, the Saracens made settlements and even, through their occupation of the passes of the Alps, they for years made communication between Italy and France a matter of the greatest difficulty and peril. The century that followed Charlemagne's death was thus a century in which his empire Latin Catholicism was continuously besieged, and, under the stress of the siege, was steadily broken and wasted.

CAROLINGIAN CATHOLICISM: PIETY, LEARNING, MISSIONS For the first thirty years or so of the period, Carolingian Catholicism continued to advance: the reform of Catholic life, the activity of the missionaries, and the fundamentally important work of intellectual revival. Louis the Pious did not share his father's failure to understand the real importance of monasticism. For him the monasteries were not merely centres of civilisation and intellectual life: they were primarily settlements of monks, sanctuaries wherein the primitive ideals of the Gospel, the perfect following of Jesus Christ, the life of prayer, were cherished and the best of opportunity provided for their realisation. Louis was the friend as well as the patron of St. Benedict of Aniane, and seconded the efforts of that great monastic reformer, as also those of his successors Arnulf of Marmoutiers and Jonas of Orleans. An imperial decree of 817 made the rule of St. Benedict obligatory on all monasteries, and laid especial emphasis on the necessity of manual labour and ascetic practices. In the same year the emperor issued, also, a rule for the canons regular and one for the nuns. Alcuin's work for liturgical uniformity was continued by his pupil Amalric, Bishop of Treves (811-850). It is from his antiphonary, and the treatises which he wrote to explain and defend it a combination of the Roman antiphonary and that of the church of Metz that the modern Roman rite largely derives. In the countrysides, the movement to establish parishes independent of those in the towns continued to make headway and, despite inevitable opposition, the movement to free these parishes from the power of the local lord. On the other hand the king, more than ever, kept the nomination of bishops in his own hands. and, for all his patronage of the monastic life, he continued, as the needs of policy dictated, to make over the abbeys to laymen. Nor did the missionary movement die with Charlemagne. Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, and foster brother of Louis the Pious, turned from his labours for the State to initiate the conversion of Denmark (822), whose king he baptised in 826. But the great name here is that of yet another Benedictine, Ansgar, a monk of Corbie. He was scarcely twenty-five when he went north to take up Ebbo's work and for nearly seventy years he spent himself to do for Denmark and the north of Germany what Boniface had done for the centre, and the Irish monks for the south. Like St. Boniface he was the pope's legate; and in Hamburg he created a second Fulda, cathedral, monastery, library and school. The apostolate in Sweden was at the same time given to Ebbo's nephew, Gauzbert. The intellectual life of this second generation of Carolingian Catholicism, the fruits of Alcuin's genius, was richer and more striking than that of the first. One of its leaders was the most famous of all Alcuin's pupils, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda in 822 and Archbishop of Mainz from 847: no original thinker certainly, but a trained mind and a lover of learning of the type of Isidore of Seville, concerned to re-edit for his own generation, and to save for the future lest it should perish, the thought of the Christian past. He wrote Manuals of Grammar and Philosophy, commentaries on Holy Scripture, on the Canon Law, controversial writings on Predestination against Gottschalk, and an encyclopaedia that left no knowledge unexplored. As Abbot of Fulda, Rabanus Maurus formed Walafrid Strabo, the poet of the century and yet another commentator on Holy Scripture; and he formed Gottschalk too. Fulda, in his time, was the greatest of all the schools of the continent. Elsewhere, too, the work went on: lectures on the Bible, St. Augustine, Boethius, discussions of the old questions of Grace and Free Will, of the Infinite and the Finite, the existence and nature of Universals. In the political struggles which filled this unhappy century, churchmen had as prominent a place as they had occupied in the routine administration of the previous generation. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, and Ebbo of Rheims were the chiefs of the party that fought against the partition policy of Louis the Pious. When this finally triumphed, the bishops again worked strongly to set up, in place of the now destroyed unity of the single emperor, a system of permanent alliances based on the Gospel principles of brotherly love. They were successful up to a point. The kings solemnly swore to keep inviolate the rights of charity and brotherhood, and their fraternal pacts were ratified as such by the assemblies of the notables. From the royal alliances. thus inspired by the teaching of the Gospel, the peace of Christ would descend to nobles and people alike. The City of God on earth seemed a long step nearer to realisation. St. Augustine, the new age's greatest prophet, had come into his own. The idea, and these practical policies that enshrined it, provoked a new interest in the morality of politics, and produced a whole new literature the De Institutione Regia of Jonas of Orleans, the Via Regia of Smaragdus, the De Rectoribus Christianis of Sedulius Scottus and, above all, the De Regis Persona of Hincmar, Ebbo's successor at Rheims after 845. Not since the days of St. Ambrose had the claim for the Church's moral supremacy in life been so insistently set forth, and never, even then, had the practical conclusions of the doctrine been proclaimed more bluntly. Political duties are moral duties; kings are as much bound to keep the moral law in their public life as ordinary men in their private lives; the Church is the divinely appointed guardian of morality, and thereby the chief power in the State. "Bishops, " said Hincmar, "are the equals of kings. More, they are superior to the king since it is they who consecrate him. As it is their privilege to anoint him, so it is their right to depose him. " So far had theory travelled since the introduction into Gaul, a hundred and twenty years earlier, of the practice of consecrating the ruler. In the Christendom of Charlemagne's successor, where Church and State continued to be one, the roles were now apparently to be reversed. The king might name the bishops, but they were to be the judges of his activities. The same ideas, but expressed with far greater force and related to the most powerful tradition in Christendom, are to be seen at work in the activities of the greatest of the contemporary popes, St. Nicholas I (858- 867). With the papacy of Nicholas I there reappears the explicit assertion of the Roman See's primitive claim to a universal primacy of jurisdiction over the Church as the consequence of Our Lord's promise to St. Peter. Thence derives Rome's unique power of summoning synods and of giving life and real value to their acts. The pope is the supreme judge of all ecclesiastical suits and the only judge in such greater causes as those to which a temporal sovereign is a party or those that concern the deposition of a bishop. In this last matter Nicholas I develops the earlier practice, according to which the popes, while reserving to themselves decisions that touched patriarchs, primates and metropolitans, left the deposition of bishops to their immediate superiors. A bishop may still be deposed by the provincial council, but the pope is insistent that the council's decision, to be effective, must have his confirmation. Not on appeal alone, does the pope show himself the immediate superior of the local episcopate. This restorer of the idea of the papal monarchy within the Church faced 110 less boldly the great contemporary difficulty of the relations of the Church with its defender: the consecrated, Church-created empire. In the fifty years that followed Charlemagne's death the Church slowly but steadily reacted against his implied relegation of the bishops and the pope to the sanctuary. The conception that the cleric s sole clerical duty was prayer and study, while the emperor would take on himself the actual management and direction of Church affairs, was increasingly challenged. In this reaction the local episcopate led the way. It was not until Nicholas I that the papacy began to dominate the reaction. Church and State for this pope are definitely not one thing, and he urges this insistently, against the ideas implicit in the actions of Carolingians in the west and of the Byzantine emperor in the east. In its own domain each of these powers is sovereign. The State, therefore, must not interfere in Church matters. It is, however, the State's duty to assist the Church a principle which in a few centuries will be developed as far as the theory that the State is an instrument in the Church's hands for the realisation of the Christian ideal. Nicholas I, however, does not go so far. Nevertheless, quoting frequently the forty-fourth psalm, "Thou hast set them princes over all the earth, " he is conscious of the pope's duty to correct even kings should they break God's law. They, too, are subject to the penalty that shuts them out of the divine society. But while excommunication remains for princes, too, a possible ultimate sanction, it is not an excommunication to which any temporal consequences are attached; there is no hint that the pope may, or must, depose the excommunicated prince; and, of course, none at all of the later idea of a holy war to drive him forth. The question has been raised as to the sources of Nicholas I's doctrine and as to his own share in its formulation. The main ideas are, of course, not his own at all. They are the traditional policy of the Roman See and he could find the classic texts that express it in the collection of canons of Denis the Short, the decretals, that is to say, of the popes of the fourth and fifth centuries and the canons of the earlier councils. He had, too, in the well-stocked armoury of the archives of his see the letters of later popes, among which the decisions of Pelagius I (556-561) and St. Gregory the Great had a special importance. Was the contemporary collection which we call the False Decretals, among the sources Nicholas I employed? The question has, apparently, never been settled absolutely. M. Fournier speaks of "un certain parfum isidorien" as discernible in his writings after 865. At the most these fabrications did no more than give new support to ideas already traditional and formed from other sources. No one, certainly, will ever again accuse the great pope of being, through his possible use of them, " a conscious liar. " The material was not, then, of the pope's own creation. But he so used it to meet the particular problem of the day, and he restated it in forms so precise and so useable that, through his letters, something of his personality passed into all the collections and thereby did much to form the mind of all the later Middle Ages. There is a further aspect of the Carolingian attempt to restore the institutions of civilised government which must be noticed, namely the desire of the scholars who were the agents of Charlemagne and his son to relate their work to something more enduring than expediency, than the necessity of the moment or the convenience of the prince. The ultimate object of all their endeavours was the restoration of the rule of Law, and their first task, here, was to rediscover the Law. This was especially true of the movement to reform the Church, its clerics and laity alike. In the enthusiasm of these eighth- and ninth-century reformers, and in their desire to strengthen their case by the adducing of the best authority, are to be found the beginnings of the new science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. These clerics are the ancestors of the systematised Canon Law of the later Middle Ages. By the time of Charlemagne's accession (768) the confusion in the minds of ecclesiastics as to the detailed rights deriving from, what all accepted, the Church's universal commission to save men's souls, was complete and entire. Three hundred and fifty years of continuous war and civil disturbance of a general breakdown of civilisation in fact had done their work. To the question what powers did the Church claim to possess according to the canons, or what powers had the Church exercised in the past, no one, anywhere, could give a satisfactory reply. Nearly three hundred years earlier, by the end of the fifth century, that is to say, in the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496), there had been formed a carefully noted collection of all the canons of the councils so far, and of the decrees of the different popes deciding cases and enunciating thereby the principles by which future cases would be decided. Then came the complete break up of the old political unity. For the next two hundred and fifty years, Spain and Gaul went their own way. In Gaul this patrimony of the law was scattered, and in great part lost to sight. In Spain, on the other hand, where alone in these outlying lands the centralisation of the hierarchy round a single primatial see Toledo-survived, the collection continued to grow through the seventh century. But by 720 Spain, as an effective influence in Christendom, was dead, thanks to the Mohammedans; and Africa, the first real home of the collection of the canons, had, from the same cause, ceased to matter. The Church in Gaul was entering upon the most chaotic period of its history, and to the confusion from internal causes there was now added in this matter of the difficulty of knowing what was the Church's authentic tradition of law a new confusion from outside. This was the introduction into Gaul, through the monk-missionaries from Ireland and England, of the innumerable Penitentials privately compiled lists of offences and sins with arbitrarily decreed penances assigned to each. Again, from the time of St. Boniface the movement had never flagged that aimed at a complete renovation of the discipline of Christian life, in both clergy and laity, a renovation based on a reorganisation of the hierarchy; from 742 councils began to be held once more, and frequently: whence innumerable new canons of discipline and, thanks to the caesaro-papism of the Frankish kings, innumerable royal capitularies to supplement them. The confusion of laws was thus, ultimately, greater than ever. The idea still, however, persisted that the new laws were but attempts to restore the ancient discipline as the one means to restore the ancient world-unity and, in the minds of those who made these new laws, more important by far was the old law which lay preserved in some of the ancient collections. In these it was realised, lay salvation from the chaos. The practical problem was to decide which of the several collections of the old law was to be taken as official. It was under these circumstances that Charlemagne asked for, and received from, Pope Adrian I (772-795) the official collection used by the Roman Church itself. The book sent to Charlemagne which we call the Hadriana was made up of an early Roman collection, as arranged by Denis the Short for Pope Hormisdas (514-523), and the texts of the later African collection. It now spread rapidly through the empire, its prestige easily outdistancing that which any other collection could claim. The reformers had in it a code and precedents that put all lesser codes out of court. The Penitentials, for example, began to be condemned in one council after another. As the ninth century went by, the influence of the Hadriana, in conjunction and combination with the Spanish collection (the Hispana), grew steadily. But although much of the old confusion was thereby lessened, this ancient law was not sufficient to serve as a basis for the correction of later-day wrongs, nor to defend the Church against the new kinds of abuses which. in ninth-century Gaul, threatened its very nature. Particularly was the old law deficient in means to stem the development by which the Church's property was gradually passing into lay hands. Charles Martel, in the eighth century, had looted the Church to finance the State; his grandson, Charlemagne, in the ninth, had turned the abuse into a legalised form of government. Deriving from the scandals was a wholesale anarchy in nomination to abbeys and sees that was still more shocking. The most pressing problem, for the reformers of the time of Charlemagne's own grandchildren (for example Charles the Bald, 840-877), was how to defend the Church from the new danger of legalised secularisation. In the first place the bishops protested, and as their motives were open to the imputation that they sought their own aggrandisement, they turned for support to the impersonal argument of Sacred Scripture. To the new growing law of the State the Church must, ultimately, oppose its own older law the law that must exist, since the Church's claim was just and, in this matter, the State a usurper. The law must be fully stated; it must not be mere generality but deal with particular cases; most important of all it must possess a prestige greater than anything that the Carolingian State and the Church in Gaul could create; to serve its purpose it must be Roman, decrees of the ancient popes dealing with these very abuses in times gone by and expressing in legal form the Church's rights and claims. Here we approach a most extraordinary happening extraordinary to us, but hardly so, to such a degree, in a time which had other literary habits. The collection desiderated by the Carolingian reformers did not exist. Whereupon some of them deliberately created it; they composed, that is to say, of set purpose probably in the diocese of Le Mans, about the year 850, and for the defence of the rights of that see a whole body of law, assigning each decree to a particular council or pope, going as far back as the second century in their desire to heighten the prestige of what they produced. These are the famous False Decretals, once when all that was known about them was that they were forgeries a powerful weapon in the quiver of the anti-Roman controversialist. They served their purpose sufficiently for knowledge of them to spread. In an age that was enthusiastic for whatever bore the mark of the ancient Roman unity an age that knew not the science of criticism they were accepted for what they professed to be. Gradually they came into use at Rome too, and by the middle of the eleventh century were accepted there in their entirety. The real importance of the False Decretals is the new detail they bring in support of the already existing acceptance of the Roman Primacy. They were devised to help Le Mans, and the best way in which Le Mans could be helped was by the invocation of Rome magni nominis umbra. The invention, of its own nature, turned ultimately to help Rome. It showed the Roman primacy in function in numerous detailed ways and it expressed the rights of the primacy so functioning in apt legal formulae; it undoubtedly assisted the development of systematic routine appeals to Rome in cases that involved the bishops; it developed a new system in which the importance of the metropolitan declined; it assisted the extension of the Church's privilege to try delinquent clerics in her own courts; and it did very much indeed to secure recognition of the sacred character of ecclesiastical property. On the other hand, the general effect of the acceptance of the False Decretals, the effect of them as an agent to resolve the existing confusion of the law, was slight. The differences continued: differences between the cited authorities, differences between the books which inspired the reformers in different parts of the empire. As the ninth century drew to its close the Carolingian empire disappeared, and in the dreadful anarchy that ensued, the chances of the effective functioning of a central authority in the Church seemed as hopeless as the chances of the imperial authority itself. With the eleventh century the work of restoration had to begin yet once again. But this work of preserving the existing knowledge, the careful encyclopaedic surveys of Rabanus Maurus, the bold revival of St. Ambrose in Hincmar and St. Nicholas I, by no means exhaust the intellectual life of this renaissance doomed to disappear so soon. In the second half of the century, the years that saw the Northmen established on every frontier of the empire, and even in his own native country, there appeared in Gaul an Irishman of genius, the greatest speculative mind since Boethius three hundred years before. This was John Scotus Erigena. Erigena's learning was in its origin not Carolingian but Irish. Of his early life we know nothing. He makes his first appearance at the court of Charles the Bald in 847, and for thirty years he is the chief figure of this last generation of Carolingian culture. Then, after 877, history loses all trace of him. He had the advantage over all his contemporaries of a superior understanding of Greek, and he was the Catholic West's one really constructive mind between Boethius and St. Anselm. His influence on the first development of medieval philosophy was very great indeed. It is not hard to trace the intellectual pedigree of this Irish thinker: the two most philosophical of all the fathers, St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa Neoplatonists both St. Maximus the Confessor and, above all, the anonymous writer for so long called and thought to be Denis the Areopagite. This writer, who now for the first time begins to be a power in Western thought, had long been known in the East. The literary device behind which he hid caused him to be identified with that Athenian whose conversion was almost the sole recorded fruit of St. Paul's famous visit. This identification whose truth the Middle Ages took for granted gave an immense prestige to the doctrines his works contained. Here was a contemporary of the apostles, no less, using the philosophy of Plato to expound his new faith. It had almost the effect of an apostle himself philosophising. The reality was very different. The author of these various books pseudo-Denis so to call him was no Athenian but a Syrian, not a contemporary of the apostles but a monk of the late fifth century. Nor was he a Catholic, though a convert from Paganism, but a Monophysite. He was a contemporary of Proclus (411-485) and of the furious controversies that were the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon. The first reference to his works that has come down is, in fact, from the arch-heretic Severus in his controversial writings against the Church in the early sixth century. Later the Catholic theologian Leontius of Byzantium also cites him and in the next century, thanks to the prestige resulting from his glorious pseudonym, he has passed into the corpus of Catholic writers, and is used extensively as a witness against heresy. He is known and used by St. Gregory the Great, St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and St. Maximus the Confessor. It was probably the last named saint whose use of pseudo-Denis gave to these writings the last needed touch of orthodox warrant. For the pope St. Martin I at the Lateran Synod of 649 he is " Denis of blessed memory. " Pope Agatho cites him, too, in his letter to the General Council of 680; and the next General Council (Nicea II in 787) quotes Denis against the Iconoclasts. It was through the Greek monks in Rome that a knowledge of these books first began to spread in the West. Pope Paul I (757-767) sent a copy of them to Pepin; and Hilduin, abbot of St. Denis and arch-chaplain to Louis the Pious, translated them into Latin. But it was the translation, annotated, of John Scotus Erigena that was the real beginning of their striking effect on medieval thought. To translate Denis into Latin was one of the greatest things Erigena ever did. His other great achievement was to provide the first generation of medieval thinkers with a completed system which explained Catholicism as a philosophical whole. The inspiration of all this work was Neoplatonic, and, except for his use of Aristotle's dialectic, Erigena was himself nothing if not a Neoplatonist. Medieval philosophy had made its great start, and had made it with the initial confusion that it was not to work out of its system for centuries. The weakness and the strength were apparent in Erigena's own contribution to that philosophy, the De Divisione Naturae which appeared after his translation of Denis, somewhere about 867. In this book we are presented with the most ambitious effort of the Catholic mind since St. Augustine himself, a philosophical discussion of the whole vast subject of God and His universe. This elaborate attempt to explain the Catholic view of the universe through Neoplatonism was a rock of offence to Erigena's contemporaries, and to the orthodox of later generations. Its author's confidence in the power of reasoning to explain the date of Revelation is boundless. His own use of logic is as strong as it is subtle. But, too often, he is ruined by a love of paradox, by an artist's delight in phrase-making, and by an exuberance of language that, at times, does grave injustice to his thought. It is not difficult to understand how, for all his good intentions, he was criticised and condemned as a Pantheist. The universe, as Erigena conceives its origin, is not too easily distinguishable from its Creator. The well-worked-out scheme of the flux and reflux of creation from the Creator leaves no place for the fact of evil and its eternal consequences. His theory of human knowledge breaks under the criticism of facts, and his claim for reason as the all-availing expounder of mystery can again only lead to disaster. It is not to be wondered that Erigena was repeatedly condemned, at Valence and at Langres in his own lifetime and later, in 1050, with Berengarius whom to some extent he inspired. Erigena, nevertheless, had not lived in vain. He had stated the problems that were to occupy all the thinkers of the next four hundred years, the relations of faith and reason, the rational exposition of the data of faith, of the universe and its relation to God. He had produced, in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem, the first ordered systematic work of this kind that Latin Catholicism had so far seen. The intellectual revival had, in the main, been a work of restoration. Alcuin and the lesser men had been chiefly concerned first to amass themselves, and then to transmit to their pupils, whatever could be found of the erudition of the ages before the barbarian invasions. Grammar, rhetoric, the rules of reasoning, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, medicine, the meaning of the Scriptures, the theological work of the fathers, particularly of St. Augustine and St. Gregory of all that these had to offer they made themselves living encyclopaedias. They were essentially schoolmasters; facts rather than ideas were their chief interest, and their writings inevitably tended to be compilations and manuals for the instruction of those less learned than themselves. The revival, in its first generation, could hardly do more. And before, in the next generation, scholars could, from this erudition, develop an interest in ideas, in intellectual speculation and the beginnings of a philosophical revival, the new invasions and the collapse of Charlemagne's political system had brought the whole movement to an end.

EASTERN CATHOLICISM: THE END OF ICONOCLASM: THE SCHISM OF PHOTIUS: 813-925 The General Council of 787, though it marked a definite victory of tradition over the Iconoclasts, hardly weakened the party's hold in those sections of the national life where for nearly a century now it had been all powerful. One stronghold of the party was the army; and the army's attachment to the religious fashions of the great military heroes of the century was possibly strengthened when the sovereigns of the Catholic restoration showed themselves, through twenty years and more, weak and incompetent rulers. The successful military revolution of 813 brought with it a vigorous Iconoclast reaction in the religious world. The emperor who then came to the throne, Leo V, was a soldier, an Armenian by birth. He began by commissioning the publication of a catena of texts from Holy Scripture and the Fathers which, apparently, favoured the practice of his sect. The next stage in the plan was that the Patriarch of Constantinople-Nicephorus I (806-815) should give the book an official approbation. But the patriarch remained true to the faith, and instead of approving what was, in effect, an Iconoclastic manifesto he summoned a council of 270 bishops and abbots in which the decisions of the General Council of 787 were renewed. The emperor bided his time and a few months later (March, 815) Nicephorus was sent into exile and a more tractable personage installed in his see. Almost immediately the new patriarch, in his turn, called a council. This time it was the Council of 753 that was re-enacted, and the canons of Nicea II were declared null and void. But the bishops were by no means unanimous in their support of this attempt to revive the heresy. They showed a much better spirit than their predecessors of sixty years before, and to subdue them the old edicts of persecution were put in force anew. The number of victims soon exceeded those of the persecution under Constantine V. Monasteries were sacked yet once again, the religious expelled and turned adrift. Many of the abbots were imprisoned and flogged, others sewn up in sacks and flung into the sea. So for five years the new reign of terror lasted, until Leo V died, assassinated, on Christmas night, 820. His successor, Michael II, and his successor's son, Theophilus, maintained the Iconoclast tradition and were also, in their measure, persecutors. Theophilus, towards the end of his reign (834-842), showed himself the most cruel of all. When he died (January 20, 842) the government of the empire, for the second time in sixty years, fell to a woman, for the new emperor was a baby two years old. Like her predecessor Irene, the new empress- mother, Theodora, was a Catholic, and the persecution ceased immediately. But, as in 784, while this was easy to accomplish, it was quite another matter to reverse the anti-Catholic development of the last thirty years and restore Catholicism officially. The position of the Empress Theodora was all the more difficult in that the patriarch was fanatically Iconoclast. However, within little more than a year she had negotiated the chief obstacles. The patriarch was removed and the abbot Methodius installed in his place. Methodius St. Methodius was the character for whom the circumstances called. He was a saint, he was a man of learning, firm in his principles and charitable in application of them. He gradually replaced the Iconoclast bishops, and while he made matters easy for those who abjured the heresy, he sternly repressed the tendencies towards an extravagant reaction favoured by one section of the Catholic party. So ended, after more than a hundred years of trouble and persecution, the movement to abolish the cult of images. It was just five hundred and twenty years since Constantine's victory over Licinius had delivered the churches of the East from the last of their pagan persecutors. For a great part of that time those churches had been racked by heresy. Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites and Iconoclasts each century had added to the list of these disturbers of ecclesiastical peace and unity. Eastern Catholicism, spared the material destruction which in the West was part of the social and political transformation of the fifth and sixth centuries, had been tested in a far more fundamental way. In no case had the trial of heresy gone by unaggravated by the action of the omnipotent emperor. Sometimes, as in the Arian troubles, the emperor was himself a heretic and strove to impose on the Church the errors it had solemnly condemned. At other times, for all that he adhered to the traditional belief, the emperor did his utmost to reunite Catholic and heretic by means of vague formulae that sacrificed the truth defined. Whence again, inevitably, a breach of communion with Rome. From one cause or another, and always, ultimately, from the emperor's hold on Eastern ecclesiastical life, the churches of the East had, out of those five hundred and twenty years, spent some two hundred and three years in schism. The reign of the emperor, Michael III, that opened with the final defeat of the Iconoclasts was to close with the beginning of the most serious breach of all. The occasion of this schism was, it is true, less important than any of the earlier occasions, and the schism lasted only a matter of ten years. But thanks to the fact that its leader, Photius, was a personality of the first rank, and thanks to his formulation of a definite case against the papal primacy, this breach in the ninth century left wounds that have never healed. The schism was indeed patched up; but during the time it lasted, a new mentality had begun to develop. The militant and aggressive anti-Roman spirit, already in evidence at the Council in Trullo a hundred and seventy years before, crystallised now into unforgettable formulae; it allied itself with the congenial principle of Byzantine superiority over the barbarised Latin West. During the century and a half that followed the final disappearance of Photius there was an apparent restoration of normal relations between Rome and the East. But below the surface the events of 858-869 had effected a permanent change, and it needed only the appearance of a second, able and ambitious personality to create anew the anti-Roman schism of Photius, in a bitter offensive, at a time when no shade of dissentient teaching troubled any of the churches in East or West. The patriarch of the restoration of the images, St. Methodius, died ill 846. His successor, Ignatius, was the youngest son of the Emperor Michael r, forced to become a monk when Leo V deposed his father in 813. Ignatius was a good man but autocratic, something of a martinet indeed, and presently his zeal to cleanse God's house began to make enemies for him in more than one quarter. There was already a strong anti-Ignatian party at Constantinople when, in the tenth year of his occupation of the patriarchal see, Ignatius came into conflict with the court. That party was led by Gregory Asbestos, an archbishop whom Ignatius had deposed, but whose deposition Rome had refused to confirm despite the patriarch's demand until it had heard both sides of the case. To the repeated requests from Rome to state his case, Ignatius, even so late as 858, had returned no answer. The empress-mother, Theodora, had by this time retired; the emperor, Michael III, was still only in his teens, and it was Theodora's brother, Bardas, who acted as regent with the title of Caesar a man of great ability, cultivated, but a loose liver. Michael III has gone down to history as Michael the Drunkard, and the Caesar, his wife turned out, was in 856 living with his daughter-in-law Eudokia. The circumstance is not, of course, unique in the history of courts, but Ignatius was not the man to let scandal go unrebuked simply because to rebuke it was to affront the man who had power of life and death over him. Remonstrances, however, were in vain; and on the feast of the Epiphany, 858, Bardas crowned all by presenting himself for Holy Communion at the patriarch's mass. Ignatius refused to administer to him. The emperor protested that this was an insult to his uncle, but Ignatius held firm. Later in that same year the emperor and the Caesar planned to rid themselves of Theodora by locking her up in some convent. But Ignatius refused to be a party to the scheme. The thing could not be decently done without his co- operation and now, weary of his continual interference, it was arranged that he should go. He was suddenly arrested, November 23, 858, and deported to the island of Terebinthos. The patriarchal see was declared vacant, and Bardas looked around for a likely man to fill it. Photius, upon whom his choice fell, was a candidate in every way unexceptional. He came of a great family which had suffered much for orthodoxy in the time of the Iconoclast emperors he was, in fact, a kinsman of the great patriarch Tarasios who had been the chief agent in the restoration of 787. Moreover, Photius had a distinguished record in the imperial service as counsellor and secretary; and he gave every sign, already at thirty, of what he was later to become-one of the most learned men who have ever lived. He was unmarried and his life was religious and beyond reproach. Had the see been really vacant Photius could hardly have been bettered as a candidate for it: save for the fact that he was a layman. But vacant it was for Bardas Ignatius having signed some kind of abdication, whether absolute or conditional is not clear and Photius accepted the nomination. On Christmas Day, 858, he was consecrated by Gregory Asbestos. Throughout the empire, however, a considerable party of bishops stood loyally by Ignatius. Whence there began a campaign to unite the episcopate in support of Photius. The Ignatian bishops met, declared the election of Photius null and void, and excommunicated him. Photius, in reply, held a council (spring of 859) which declared Ignatius and his partisans deposed. Next the government intervened, to carry out the sentences of Photius' synod. Soon the supporters of Ignatius were, like him, locked up in prisons, where they were maltreated and tortured. Rome, so far, had not come into the matter at all; but in 859, with the hope that the Roman prestige would reduce the opposition, both Photius and the emperor approached the pope-Nicholas I. They explained that Ignatius, broken by age and ill-health, had resigned; Photius, with extreme reluctance, had accepted the promotion in his place; there were still remnants of Iconoclasm in the capital, and Ignatius, in his retirement, had entangled himself in political matters; he had, also, been guilty of transgressing several papal decrees. For this reason Photius had been compelled to excommunicate him. Nicholas I was determined not to recognise Photius until he had gathered independent information about the whole affair He decided that an enquiry was called for and sent to Constantinople as his legates the Bishops of Porto and Anagni. They were sent to enquire into the circumstances in which Ignatius had ceased to be patriarch to report and not to judge. But, exceeding their commission, they went into the history of Ignatius' own election fourteen years before, and into the history of his treatment of the Roman requests in the matter of Gregory Asbestos. Then, in May 861, they presided at a synod where Ignatius was again deposed because his own election was irregular, and because of his illegal procedure with Gregory. Ignatius, thereupon, appealed to the pope. The affair dragged on very slowly. First of all the legates returned with their official report, and with more lying letters from Photius and the court. In March, 862, at a synod in Rome the whole matter was examined. The blundering of the legates was made clear: the pope disavowed them and ordered their punishment; as to Photius, he refused to recognise him as a bishop, holding Ignatius to be the holder of the see until the case against him should be established. Then, at last, there arrived in Rome the appeal of Ignatius against the synod of 861 and the legates, telling, for the first time, the story of the share of the palace in his original deposition. In a new synod (April 863) the pope, with the statements of all parties before him, now definitely decided for Ignatius; the legates were deposed; Photius was excommunicated, should he not surrender the place he had usurped; Ignatius and his supporters were solemnly restored. To the emperor the pope wrote "advising and commanding" him to restore Ignatius; while to the other patriarchs he gave the reasons for his case against Photius and the imperial court: they had condemned Ignatius without a fair trial; they had installed a successor before his case was canonically terminated; at the trial, when this did take place, Ignatius was judged by his own subjects; and finally Photius, a layman, had been consecrated patriarch without observance of the necessary canonical intervals between his receiving the successive orders of deacon, priest and bishop. The emperor replied in a letter which the pope described as "filled with insult and blasphemy". He utterly refused to accept the Roman decision, and threatened to send an army to bring the pope to his senses. Photius struck the pope's name out of the mass an action tantamount to excommunication. To all of which Nicholas replied in a famous letter, (September 28, 865) as long as a treatise, in which, while he reminds the Easterners again and again that the primatial rights of the Roman Church are of divine institution, he offers, if it will satisfy them, to have the whole case tried anew. The next two years saw no change in the situation save an additional aggravation due to the mission in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians had first made appeal for missionaries to Constantinople about the time when Photius had been intruded into the see. He had sent missionaries as they asked, and Michael III had stood sponsor to their king, Boris, at his baptism (864). But the mission had not been too successful. Boris wanted a hierarchy of bishops that would be independent of Constantinople. Photius made difficulties. And so, in 866, the Bulgarian king, influenced partly at any rate by political considerations, turned to Rome; and in answer Nicholas I sent two Latin bishops, one of them destined, in time, himself to be pope. This was Formosus, then Bishop of Porto, successor to the bishop deposed by the synod of 863. At the same time the pope sent legates to Constantinople to explain and defend his sending a mission into Bulgaria. They carried despatches of an even more violent tone than the letter of 865, the emperor being now bidden to burn publicly the "blasphemous" letter of 863. But the legates were turned back at the frontier, and Photius made the Latin "aggression" in Bulgaria the occasion for the most effective thing he ever did. This was a long and violent anti-Roman manifesto, set forth in an encyclical letter to the other patriarchs. It was destined to be, and it still remains, the charter of the separate status of Constantinople and its dependent churches. The Latin "invasion" of the Greek missionary territory is described, and the danger to the faith of the neophyte from the Latin ignorance and errors. These are listed: the Latins fast on Saturdays; they eat milk foods in the three days between Quinquagesima Sunday and Ash Wednesday; they look down on married clergy; they reject the Confirmation given by a priest; and they have corrupted the Creed by adding the words "and from the Son" to the clause which, speaking of the Holy Ghost, says " Who proceeds from the Father". For which reasons Photius summons all the bishops of his patriarchate to a council which shall discuss and condemn these errors. Of that council we know little, save that it met and declared Nicholas I deposed, and that it deposed, too, all who supported him, "forerunners of apostasy, servants of Antichrist. . . liars and fighters against God" as the encyclical proclaimed them to be. Also, it is to be noted, Photius endeavoured to win over the emperor in the West, Louis II. There is nothing new in Photius' refusal to accept the Roman sentence after invoking Rome's authority. What is new, and unprecedented, in a Patriarch of Constantinople, is his attack on the papacy as such, and on its hitherto universally recognised right. It was, apparently, in the summer of 867 that these last events took place, and it is hard to say if Nicholas I ever knew of them. His health was failing all through that year and on November 13 he died, making efforts to the very end to mobilise the scholarship of the West in opposition to an opponent whom he recognised to be a man supremely learned. By the time the pope died, and before he could have known of it, that able and learned, hut shifty adversary had, however, himself been removed. But not by death. One of the imperial equerries, Basil the Macedonian, had been gradually creeping nearer to the throne. In 866 he had had Bardas murdered, and had succeeded to his place. On September 23, 867, it was the turn of Michael III; and Basil was proclaimed emperor. A wholesale reversal of his predecessor's acts followed. Among the favourites who fell was Photius, a long-standing rival of Basil at the court; and on November 23 Ignatius was solemnly restored to the patriarchal throne. Photius was sent into exile. Between these events and the General Council of Constantinople which solemnly accepted the Roman judgement about them, there is the long interval of nearly two years an interval which is not merely practical testimony to the very real obstacle of geographical distance that now separated the two great centres of Christian life, but which also symbolises the distance which separated the Roman idea of the task before the council from what the new emperor, and his patriarch, had envisaged when they proposed it to the pope. Once more the meeting of a general council in the East was to be the occasion of new serious difficulties between pope and emperor, and, as on so many previous occasions, it was to leave behind memories whence would spring new, lasting troubles. For the new emperor, Basil I, the thing that really mattered, in these years 867-870, was the very urgent problem of reconciling the two factions of ecclesiastics and their followers into which the churches of his empire had been, for ten years now, divided- "Ignatians and Photians". If the pope would consent to judge between them, on the basis of the events of 858, and if both parties would appear before him to plead their case, such a Roman decision might very well end the troubles. And what the pope decided in Rome it would be well that a council, meeting at Constantinople, should ratify. But for the pope, these domestic troubles of the church of Constantinople were only one element of the affair. Since the original mischief arising out of the substitution of Photius for Ignatius in 858, there had occurred two events of the utmost gravity, and of far greater importance than the question, even, which of the two men was the lawful Patriarch of Constantinople. Photius, in his capacity as patriarch, had, in fact, denied the papacy's right as the divinely instituted primate of the Church of Christ; he had done this in the most solemn way, in a great council. And a host of Eastern bishops had supported his action. That Rome should, and would, forgive the now repentant bishops was very desirable and all to the good, but the pope in this reconciliation, could not, without betraying his primacy, ignore an event of such magnitude as the recent wholesale denial of its existence. When then, in June 869, the pope Adrian II considered with his council the letters sent by the emperor and Ignatius, the main question that occupied his mind was the Photian council of 867 and the patriarch's encyclical letter that had preceded it. This was the main subject of the Roman deliberations, and while an amnesty was offered to the Eastern bishops who repented their share in the event, the council of 867 was condemned and Photius again excommunicated, with the severe proviso that, even should he repent, he was not, ever again, to enjoy more than a layman's status in the Church. The emperor had asked the pope to take part in the council planned to assemble at Constantinople, and Adrian II agreed. The three legates he sent to preside in his name carried with them letters for the emperor and for Ignatius. The pope made it clear in his instructions to the legates and the legates faithfully obeyed his instructions that the council was not to reopen the questions he had already decided at Rome, but to accept his decisions, and give them a solemn public promulgation. The council reckoned as the Eighth General Council opened on October 5869. Besides the legates, and the patriarchs and their representatives, there were barely a dozen bishops present. Nor did the numbers greatly increase as the weeks went by. There were 21 bishops at the fifth session, at which Photius made his first appearance; 38 at the eighth, on November 8; 65 at the ninth and, for the solemn session which closed the council, February 28, 870, 103 of whom 37 were metropolitans. There was no difficulty about the condemnation of Photius, who maintained a haughty silence before his judges. But when it came to the trial of his supporters among the bishops, and to the testimony of those who professed repentance, there were occasional scenes. Adrian II's instructions were that all were to sign the famous formula drawn up three hundred years before by Pope Hormisdas (514-523), and used by him as a test of orthodoxy in the reconciliation which ended the schism of Acacius. "The first condition of salvation" the formula declared "is to keep the rule of the true faith and in no way to deviate from the laws of the Fathers. And because the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ: 'Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build My Church, etc., ' cannot be passed over. What things were thus said are proved by the resulting events, because in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been kept free from blemish. We then, wishing to be by no means parted from that hope and faith. . . anathematise all heresies. . . . And therefore I hope that I may deserve to be with you in that one Communion, which the Apostolic see teaches, in which [Communion] is the whole, real and perfect solidity of the Christian religion. And I promise that in future I will not say in the holy Mysteries the names of those who are banished from the Communion of the Catholic Church, that is who do not accord with the Apostolic See. " One bishop began to argue that this Roman assertion of an indefectible faith was not historically true, and the emperor showed signs of wanting the point argued. But the legates insisted. The bishop must sign or be condemned. Nor was this the only dissension. Basil, as though to forestall any action by the legates which might endanger his own plan, namely not so to antagonise the party of Photius that it would be impossible to reconcile them with Ignatius, had sent one of the high officials of the court to control the debates, and between this personage and the legates there was more than one lively incident. Finally there was the mysterious "suspension" of the council which, suddenly, did not meet at all for two whole months part of which period, according to one account, was spent by the chief of the legates, Marinus, under arrest, for resisting the emperor's wishes. But whatever the differences and difficulties the papal will was finally carried out, as the series of twenty-seven canons shows, promulgated at the final session February 28, 870. In these the Iconoclasts were again condemned. The interference of the State in episcopal elections was condemned too; elections where the State has interfered are to be held null and void: those so elected are to be deposed, even if consecrated. Synods, it is declared, do not need the presence of the emperor or his legate for the validity of their acts. No one is to presume to depose any of the patriarchs; and especially no one is to do what Photius has done of late, and what Dioscoros did of old, that is to say write and put into circulation calumnies against the pope. Should anyone so presume he is to be punished with the punishment meted out to them. Any prince who attempts to coerce the freedom of the pope, or of any of the patriarchs, is anathema. Should any doubt or controversy touching the Holy Roman Church come before a general council the matter is to be examined with becoming reverence. In no case is sentence to be defiantly given against the Supreme Pontiffs of the elder Rome. In this last session the emperor, too, intervened: with a speech urging the Church's right freely to manage its own affairs. Nevertheless, the tension in which the council had done its work continued to the end, and survived its close. In the last few days the legates had to complain of the theft from their baggage of the retractations signed by the bishops of Photius' party. And, a much more serious matter, in those same last days there arrived at Constantinople a mission from the Bulgarian king. He was finally determined not to link himself with Rome, since the pope resolutely refused to let him have Formosus as bishop. Once more, then, Boris besought the Patriarch of Constantinople to provide him with bishops and priests. The Roman legates protested vigorously; and there was a tense period when a new schism, with Ignatius as the papal adversary, seemed not unlikely. It ended by the legates formally forbidding Ignatius, in the pope's name, to send missionaries to Bulgaria, and in Ignatius making a dutiful, but very general, declaration of submission to the pope. Then the legates departed but by the time they had reached Rome the patriarch had equipped the Bulgarian Church with a complete hierarchy, an archbishop and twelve bishops. The legates were a long time on their way home. They left Constantinople in the spring of 870, but did not reach Rome until some time in June 871. The news of the council's proceedings, and of the legates' difficulties, had preceded them; and Adrian II, instead of any formal ratification of the decrees, sent, along with a complimentary letter to the emperor, a strongly worded complaint to the patriarch about his new activities in Bulgaria, threatening him with excommunication, and actually laying the sentence upon those now usurping in Bulgaria the episcopal jurisdiction. The situation had not at all improved when, twelve months later, Adrian II died. His successor, John VIII, was a man of like views, but stronger and more vigorous in action. He had been archdeacon of the Roman Church for many years, and was thoroughly conversant with the complications of the problems before him. From the beginning of his reign this new pope took a strong line about the Byzantine "invasion" of Bulgaria. "If the treacherous Greeks do not depart, " he wrote to King Boris, "we are determined to depose Ignatius. " And, Ignatius proving obstinate, John VIII, in April 878, sent legates to offer him the choice between the faithful carrying out of his promises and deposition. But when the legates reached Constantinople they found that Ignatius was dead that he had died, indeed, six months before they set out. A new patriarch reigned in his place: it was Photius. The appointment was natural enough from the emperor's point of view. The main problem in the religious life of the day was still the division, now twenty years old, that had begun with Michael III's deposition of Ignatius in 858. Photius, at the time of this second nomination as patriarch, had himself long been reconciled with Ignatius, and had been set at liberty. His diplomatic gifts had erased from the emperor's mind the memory of their old rivalry, and he had been appointed tutor to Basil's heir, the future emperor, Leo the Philosopher. There was every hope that the appointment of Photius as successor to Ignatius would finally rally all but the most fanatical of the dissidents. But what about the pope? Upon Photius there still lay the terrific sentences of the council of 869 and, above all, the pope's decision that henceforth he was to be no more than a layman in the Church. The legates had no competence to deal with any element of this new problem. But they did not return to Rome. Instead they wrote to John VIII, telling him of the great event and, it would seem, endeavouring to win him to sympathise with the emperor's solution. The emperor also wrote, and so did Photius. And the pope showed himself very favourable. It needs to be said that John VIII had other worries, very practical questions of life and death, which at this moment inclined him to take an easy view of the latest events at Constantinople. The Carolingian empire was now in the last stages of disintegration. It was only with difficulty that the pope could persuade one of the great family to take upon him the name of emperor: and this at a moment when the Saracens threatened to be masters, not only in southern Italy, but even in Rome itself! If the emperor at Constantinople could not be persuaded to defend the pope against the Saracens, Rome's case was desperate indeed. This political anxiety was, indeed, one of the matters with which the legates despatched to correct Ignatius in 878 had originally been charged; and in their letters reporting the re-appearance of Photius they were able to tell the pope of the emperor's sympathetic dispositions towards the problem of the safety of Rome. It was, then, in the happiest mood towards the emperor, and Photius, that John VIII, in the spring of 879, summoned his Roman council to consider the new aspect of the patriarch's career. He determined to recognise Photius as lawful patriarch and he cancelled and quashed all the sentences of the council of 869-870, and forbade anyone, ever again, to cite them against Photius. But Photius was to give some sign of repentance for his actions in the bad days of 867, and he was to pledge himself to withdraw the missionaries sent to Bulgaria. Once again the Roman decisions were to be given the publicity of acceptance and promulgation in a council at Constantinople and this took place the following winter, November, 879-March 880. Photius was now all that any pope could desire. He made all the prescribed promises, even about the Bulgarian mission, and the legates solemnly granted him acknowledgement, and robed him in the handsome vestments sent by the pope as a special mark of affection. There was, however, less agreement about the Roman demand that laymen were not to be promoted to the episcopate without the usual intervals between the various sacred orders received. And, according to one account, there was a tense moment when the question of the Filioque clause in the Creed was raised. This crisis, however, was resolved by the diplomacy of Photius so this same account and all the more easily since, so far, the popes too had refused to insert the words even Leo III when asked by Charlemagne. John VIII confirmed all that the council had done and for the short remainder of his reign he died, murdered in 882 the peace between Rome and Constantinople continued undisturbed. When Pope John VIII recognised Photius in 879 as the lawful patriarch of Constantinople, it was, however, an unfortunate by- product of his action that the party traditionally associated with the cause of the dead patriarch, Ignatius, the pro-Roman party of the crises of 858 and 867, now became the party whose policy was schism "on principle". The great council of 879 was to them an abomination; and their account of it, wholly misrepresenting what took place stating, indeed, the very contradictory of the fact not only served their party needs in the next generation, but continued to mislead all the Western historians until our own time. According to that false account, the pope repudiated the council of 879 and from this there resulted a renewal of the schism on the part of Photius. Behind the screen of the falsehood and the forgeries there lies this much of the truth, namely that John VIII's action did not have the universal approval of the high officials of the Roman Curia. Among those who, at Rome, still eyed Photius askance was the one-time legate to the council of 869, Marinus; and it was Marinus who succeeded John VIII as pope in 882. Stephen V, too, in whose time Photius was deposed by the emperor Leo VI (886), was of the same mind; as was also the next pope, Formosus, a strong personality seemingly, and a strong opponent of all John VIII's policies. There followed, then, upon the pro-Photius decision of 879, a period when it might seem that the anti-Photius party at Constantinople could still look to Rome for support. The imperial deposition of Photius, in 886, was an opportunity for the party to invoke it. But the popes were too wary to act on the first scanty statements of the events that came to them. Before granting recognition to the new patriarch Stephen a boy of sixteen, the emperor's own younger brother they asked for more information about the circumstances in which Photius had ceased to reign. In the end, it would seem, Stephen V granted the recognition. Then his successor, Formosus, intervened sending legates to state the Roman view about the validity of the orders conferred by Photius. This intervention, it is held, probably contented neither of the rival parties. It was not until the stormy reigns of Formosus (891-896) and his next five short-lived successors (896-898) were over that John IX, in a rare interval of peaceful papal possession of Rome, brought about a reconciliation between "Ignatians" and "Photians", and between the patriarchate and the Holy See (899). The peace lasted just eight years. What broke it up was a furious controversy about the legitimacy of the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI. His first wife had died in 893, and his second in 896. In 899 he had married a third time, and in 900 this wife too had died. None of these wives had brought him an heir and Leo, not venturing upon a fourth alliance so strong was the tradition in the Eastern churches against re-marriage-was living in notorious concubinage when, in 905, a son was born to him. He now approached the patriarch, anxious for some means to be found whereby this child should be recognised as his heir. The patriarch was Nicholas, called Mystikos, one of the major personalities of his line, who by his ability and his learning and his early career in the imperial service as well as by kinship was another Photius. Nicholas proposed that he should baptise the child with all the ceremonial appropriate to the emperor's heir, but that the emperor should separate from his mistress, Zoe. To this Leo agreed. But, the baptism over, he not only brought back Zoe, but himself crowned her as empress (906) and persuaded a priest to bless their marriage. And now, while the patriarch buried himself in his study to think out a canonical solution for the problem, the emperor bethought himself to consult, and to beg a dispensation from, the other three patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch and Jerusalem, and from the pope. Upon this Nicholas hardened his heart. The quasi- independence of his administration seemed threatened, and when the Roman legates arrived from Sergius III with what he knew would be a reply favourable to the emperor, Nicholas refused to receive them; and he organised his own metropolitans to swear to die rather than agree that a fourth marriage could be lawful (906). In February, 907 Nicholas was suddenly arrested, an obedient synod declared him deposed, and some kind of acceptance of his fate was obtained from him. The synod chose in his place one of the great ascetics of the day, the monk Euthymos, and it granted the emperor the permission he sought; the priest who had actually married Leo and Zoe was however deposed, for having done this without authorisation. Finally, when the emperor proposed to legalise fourth marriages the synod declared that not only fourth marriages but third marriages too were unlawful; and the new patriarch steadfastly refused to crown the empress, or to allow her to be publicly prayed for as empress. The emperor's personal problem was solved, but no more than this; and there were now new divisions throughout the East, between the partisans of Nicholas, and those who recognised Euthymos. Five years after these events when Leo the Philosopher died (912), there was a "palace revolution"; Nicholas was brought back and Euthymos deposed. In the general "revenge" Nicholas did not forget his score against Rome; and he sent the pope, Anastasius III, an ultimatum demanding that the decision given in 906 be reversed and the legates who bore it punished; otherwise he would strike the pope's name out of the mass. The Roman reply has not survived, but presently the threat was carried out. Once again the church of Constantinople was in schism, while in the capital the patriarch and the empress-mother Zoe fought for supremacy in a maze of palace intrigues. These came to an end when, in 919, the grand- admiral, Romanus Lecapenus, forced his way to the throne, marrying the boy emperor, Constantine VII, to his daughter and compelling recognition of himself as joint-emperor. In a great council at Constantinople in 920 Romanus forced upon the various religious factions a skilfully arranged compromise; and three years later the quarrel with Rome was also healed. No details of the reconciliation have come down to us. We know of two letters from Nicholas to the pope, John X, and that the legates he asked for were sent to Constantinople. We also possess the account which Nicholas gave of the affair to the King of the Bulgarians, Simeon. It is a curious document, and ominous for the future. The patriarch, who is sending with it a letter from the pope designed to lessen the Bulgarian king's hostility to the emperor, warns Simeon that "to despise the authority of the pope is to insult the prince of the apostles". And then he tells, in his own fashion, the story of the conflict about the lawfulness of fourth marriages, of the great scandal, and of how the Roman See has finally ratified all the condemnations issued by Nicholas. " Like Photius in 880, Nicholas came out of the fight with all the honours of war. " If there was a surrender anywhere, it was according to his version on the part of Rome. The letter is, by implication, yet another assertion of Constantinople's claim to autonomy, to a jurisdiction practically sovereign. And herein lies, no doubt, the main importance in history of this long-drawn- out, and not too well-known, Byzantine aggression.

THE ROMAN SEE AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EMPIRE, 814-900 The genius of Catholicism continued, then, to transcend the weaknesses of its members even in this dying world. The weaknesses were as evident as in the days of St. Boniface ignorant clergy, worldly lords and successful brigands masquerading as prelates, a greedy laity taking every occasion the times offered to lay hands on ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction for their own profit. Nowhere is the struggle that shook the whole Church better seen than in the history of its primatial see, in the story of the development of the Frankish protectorate during the eighty or ninety years that followed Charlemagne's death. It is the story of the ever-increasing hold of the emperor on the papacy, and of the gradual disappearance of the principle of free election. The idea grows that the papacy, a thing eminently profitable, is worth much violence to secure, and at Rome there are soon rival factions traditionally hostile, to whom every vacancy presents an opportunity for fraud, violence, and sacrilege. These factions outlive the empire, and once the strong hand of the emperor has gone the papacy is at their mercy. Charlemagne was scarcely dead when the faction which, in 799, had tried to murder Leo III, seized its opportunity. But now the plot was discovered in time, and arrests and executions were the order of the day. Protests went to the emperor. The death penalty, the punishment of the Roman Law for the outrage on the Roman maiestas, seemed to the Franks unnecessarily harsh. And, since the emperor was emperor of the Romans, should he not have been consulted? So Louis the Pious sent a commission to Rome to enquire, and the pope explained himself. The plots continued and the next year, 816, an insurrection broke out. It was suppressed by the Franks just in time to save the pope. Then, in June 816, Leo III died. The election was made, in conformity with the decree of 769, by the clergy alone. They elected the deacon Stephen, who, like' Leo's predecessor Adrian I, was a noble and therefore qualified to unite the contending parties. He reigned only six months, but in that short time he recalled the exiles of 799 and 814, saw to it that all his people swore allegiance to the emperor, and, in October, 816, solemnly crowned Louis at Rheims. With the unexpected death of Stephen IV (January 25, 817) the forces that had ruled during the twenty-one years of Leo III's reign returned to power, in the person of the new pope, Pascal I. The reign was as troubled as that of Leo III. It began with the now customary announcement to the emperor of the pope's election and with a confirmation of the pact of amity between the two powers. The text of the pact of 816 is the earliest that has survived. The emperor guarantees the pope's sovereignty over the Italian territories, which arc specified in detail, and he guarantees also that the papal election shall be free and unhindered. On the other hand, he reserves the right to receive appeals from the pope's subjects. In 822 there was a notable instance of the exercise of this right when Louis' son, Lothair whom Louis had himself crowned King of Italy, as he himself had been crowned by Charlemagne decided an appeal of the nobility against the pope. The next year there were more serious troubles. Some of the appellants of 822 were murdered, and the pope was accused of being privy to the deed. He protested his innocence and, following the precedent of Leo III, solemnly purged himself by oath. Twelve months later the unhappy pope was dead, and the internal dissensions precipitated in a double election. Thanks to the influence of the monk Wala who was Lothair's chief adviser, and who chanced to be in Rome, one party gave way and the archpriest Eugene was unanimously acknowledged the candidate of the nobility. The emperor, weary of the endless scandals that resulted from the Roman factions, determined to end them by a careful, systematic and official delimitation of powers. A mission was sent to Rome under the nominal presidency of the young king, Lothair, after whom the pact in which it issued was called the Constitution of Lothair. On the whole the balance of the new arrangement was unfavourable to the pope. The pope, henceforth, must not put to death anyone who enjoyed the emperor's protection, nobles that is to say and dignitaries Romans accused of serious crimes were to have a choice by which law they would be judged, Roman or Frank or Lombard. The magistrates were to be nominated by the emperor, who was now to be represented at Rome by two permanent commissioners, one of them nominated by the pope. They were to make an annual report to the emperor on the papal government, and to receive appeals against its action. Should the pope refuse to do justice to such appeals the commissioners were to send them on to the emperor. Finally, the Constitution regulated the papal election. None but Romans were to take part in the election, and a notable reversal of existing law the laity were to have a share in it. And the newly-elect was to swear an oath to the emperor in the presence of the commissioners and the people. The history of the next few elections interprets the new arrangement. The emperor is very definitely the overlord of Rome, and the pope is not consecrated until the emperor's representative is satisfied that the election has been made in accordance with the prescribed form. Eugene II accepted the Constitution, and in a council of the bishops of the Roman province he promulgated the new regulations for the election of the pope. Then, only a few months later, in August, 827, he too died. His successor, Valentine, lived for a few weeks only. The next effective pope was Gregory IV, elected in October, 827, but not consecrated until after the imperial commissioners, six months later, had come to Rome and confirmed the election. The new system was an established fact, and the nobility had been given a new hold on the papacy, a hold which tended, from the first, so to increase that the clergy's part in elections was, often enough, to be by comparison a very secondary affair indeed. Gregory IV was an exceptionally long-lived pope. His sixteen years' pontificate saw the beginning of the disastrous civil wars between Louis the Pious and his sons, in which the pope in the interests of unity and peace opposed the emperor's schemes of partition. It saw, too, the establishment of the Mohammedans in Sicily and the beginning of their attacks on Italy itself. The duchy of Benevento was at this time disputed between rival claimants, both of whom called in bands of Saracens as auxiliaries. In every new event the end of the Carolingian peace was already beginning to be proclaimed when, in the beginning of 844, Gregory died. The election of his successor showed once more the reality of the new imperial suzerainty. As in 824, there was a double election. The candidate of the nobility, Sergius, managed to expel his rival from the Lateran and was himself, thereupon, consecrated and enthroned. The emperor, Lothair, had not been consulted, and to maintain his right, now sent his son, the future emperor, Louis II, with an army, to examine into the election. There was an enquiry, much questioning of all who took part, and finally Sergius was recognised as pope. He proceeded, thereupon, to consecrate the young king and to swear fidelity to the emperor his father. Furthermore, it was again carefully stipulated that no one was to be consecrated pope without the sanction of the emperor or his representative. Sergius II was elderly, gouty, and lacking entirely in the gift of ruling. His one title to consideration was his noble birth, that he came from the family that had given Eugene II to the Church, and was later to give Adrian II too. The pope's brother, Benedict, a nobleman of shifty ways and dissolute life, was soon installed as Bishop of Albano and his chief adviser. Soon it was known that the one thing necessary under the regime was money. Offices, benefices, appointments and favours of every sort, were on sale; and to supplement where these means fell short, the pope and his brother set themselves to pillage the monasteries. Then, a divinely appointed chastisement, men said, for the election of so worthless a pope, on August 23, 846, the Mohammedans landed at Ostia and making their way along the Tiber sacked and pillaged the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. Against Rome itself they were powerless; the old walls were an obstacle such an expedition could not hope to force. But the whole of the Christian West shivered at the sacrilege, and the emperor was moved by the general indignation to raise funds to fortify the basilica of St. Peter, and to organise an expedition and drive the Saracens from Italy. The miserable old pope did not long survive the indignity He died in January, 847. In his place the Romans elected Leo, the priest of the church of the Four Crowned Martyrs. With the money which the imperial tax brought him, with offerings from all over Christendom, and with taxes on his own domains he fortified the district round St. Peter's the district called ever since, in memory of him, the Leonine City. It was no luxury of building, for the Mohammedans continued to molest the coast and the districts at the mouth of the Tiber during all the rest of the reign. Leo IV's relations with the emperor never attained to cordiality. He had been consecrated without the emperor's permission though this had been put right by a declaration that the pope in no way denied the emperor's rights and when, in 850, the young Louis II, associated now with his father as emperor, came to live in Italy as its king the delicacy of the situation was greatly increased The pope complained of the emperor's representative at Rome and the emperor seems to have supported discontented papal functionaries against the pope. Leo IV, from the point of view of imperial policy, fell very short indeed of perfection as pope. The emperor began to make plans for the future. A new departure was at hand. The emperor, at the next vacancy, would have his own candidate and, an imperialist pope elected, harmony would reign between the two powers. The priest Anastasius on whom, for this dubiously honourable promotion, Louis II cast his eyes was a mall of no small distinction. He was the son of the Bishop of Orte, a strong imperialist, whom the emperor had more or less compelled the pope to choose as the papal member of the commission of superintendence. Anastasius was unusually well educated. In addition to a wide knowledge of ecclesiastical literature, for example, he had a good command of Greek. Now he suddenly disappeared from Rome and the next news was that he was living in the neighbourhood of the imperial court. The pope, suspecting an understanding with the emperor, and fearing perhaps a schism, ordered him to return. He refused, and thereupon, after a succession of warnings, the pope excommunicated him and specifically deprived him of any right to be elected pope in the future, laying an excommunication on whoever should presume to vote for him. The relations of pope and emperor were in this state when, July 17, 855, Leo IV died. The sequel to the emperor's plans was curious. Anastasius was of course still absent from Rome, and unanimously the Romans elected Benedict, the priest of St. Cecilia. This election the emperor refused to ratify. His commissioners appeared at Rome with an escort and with them came Anastasius, the emperor's candidate. The number of their partisans increased as they journeyed, Benedict was arrested, and Anastasius took possession of the papal palace. But the clergy held firm. Anastasius lay under sentence of deposition and by Church Law no deposed ecclesiastic could receive promotion. The commissioners had to yield; and in a solemn assembly at St. Mary Major's, Benedict, released now, was re- elected and the election confirmed. The sentences against Anastasius were renewed. He was reduced to the lay state and made Abbot of Sta. Maria in Trastevere. There, in studious retirement, he remained, preparing himself for the next office to which the emperor destined him, that of permanent imperial commissioner at Rome charged to keep watch on the pope. His father still held office as the papal nominee on the Commission, and so Anastasius would triumph, despite Pope Benedict's re-election ! But before the scheme matured Benedict III died (April 17, 858). This time the emperor himself assisted at the election. He did not repeat the mistake of 855 and suggest an ineligible candidate, but proposed, and succeeded in carrying, the election of a very distinguished man indeed. This was St. Nicholas I, the greatest pope between St. Gregory and Hildebrand, one of the three popes whom alone of the two hundred and sixty posterity has agreed to call "the Great. " He owed his election, none the less, to Louis II, for the Roman clergy had had another in view. The new pope managed to keep on good terms with the emperor. Anastasius he disarmed by making him, to use a modern term, his secretary of state, in which capacity the forthcoming schism of Photius and the struggle with Hincmar of Rheims, soon gave him ample scope to show himself one of the great defenders of papal rights. When Louis II demanded the reinstatement of the Archbishop of Ravenna, excommunicated for his misgovernment, the pope held firm despite the emperor's personal intervention; and, carrying the war into the other camp, he renewed the decree of 769 forbidding non-Romans the emperor's envoys for example to interfere in papal elections. Nicholas was no mere statesman, but a man of saintly life, and his natural courage was reinforced by the invincible prestige of personal holiness. The emperor withdrew his support from the excommunicated prelate, while the pope descended on Ravenna and saw personally to the restoration of order. Finally the archbishop submitted. This dispute was but a preliminary skirmish. In 863 a battle royal developed between pope and emperor. The cause was the annulment of the marriage of the emperor's brother, Lothair II of Lorraine, and his re-marriage. The bishops of Lorraine had sanctioned the re- marriage twice in synod. It was once more sanctioned in a great council at Metz, presided over by the pope's legates and then, in the October of the same year, the pope quashed the decisions of the councils, and since both the law and the facts were so evident that no honest man could be in doubt, deposed the Archbishops of Cologne and Treves for their share in the scandal and recalled his legates to take their trial. The decision was a signal for all the discontented to combine: the King of Lorraine of course, the emperor, still sore over the Ravenna defeat, the Archbishop of Ravenna, even the schismatic Photius, in distant Constantinople, was approached. Presently a great army, led by the brother sovereigns, moved on Rome. The pope gave himself to prayer. Processions filled the streets, the people prayed and fasted. For two whole days the pope prayed before the tomb of St. Peter. Then the tide began to turn. The emperor fell ill. He asked nothing better than a reconciliation. The great combination broke up and the affair ended with the pope stronger than ever. Nicholas I died, all too soon, after a reign of only nine years (858-867). His successor, Adrian II, elected without difficulty, was again not consecrated until Louis II had approved. He was soon involved in serious difficulties with the family of Anastasius. Adrian, to begin with, without reversing the decisions of his predecessor, tended towards a policy of leniency to some of the malcontents of the late reign. Anastasius persisted in the contrary sense, and in the end had his way. Between the son, who thus dominated the spiritual administration, and his father the aged Arsenius who controlled the temporal, the papacy, with a weak pope, was very much what this family chose to make it. And behind them was the emperor. A new manoeuvre which would have extended their power still further failed however. It ended in a fearful crime symptomatic of the more sinister tendencies of the time and prophetic of the future and this ruined all. Adrian II, while as yet in minor orders, had married and his wife and daughter were still alive at the time of his election. Arsenius now planned a marriage between the pope's daughter and his own younger son Eleutherius. But the pope had other views. As in other states, so in the papal state, a matrimonial alliance could be of high political importance. This new, and unecclesiastical, novelty, had shown itself already when Adrian's two predecessors, Benedict III and Nicholas I, had been careful to marry off their nieces to important members of the local nobility as a means to secure their loyalty. Adrian had made similar plans for his daughter. Eleutherius, however, would take no denial, and finally kidnapped both mother and daughter. The pope appealed to the emperor and presently the imperial officers were hot in pursuit. Eleutherius, surrounded, murdered both the girl and her mother. He was taken and himself put to death. Meanwhile the pope denounced Anastasius as the author of the plot and, in his anger, renewed against him all the old sentences of twenty years before and deprived him of the post of librarian (868). Later he managed to prove his innocence and Adrian reinstated him. The incident is yet another instance of the speed with which the papacy was being forced along the road of secularisation, and of what it had to fear from the brutal Roman nobility against whom the emperor was its sole defence. On April 12, 875, the emperor Louis II died, the last effective ruler to hold undisputed sway in Italy. Adrian II had predeceased him by three years. In his stead ruled yet a fourth nominee of Louis II. This was John VIII, and to him there now fell the delicate task of deciding, since Louis II had no male heirs, to which of his uncles, Charles the Bald of France or Louis the German of Germany, the imperial title should now descend. For the first time there was a France and a Germany between which the papal diplomacy must needs choose. For the first time it depended 011 the pope whether a King of France or a King of Germany should be the dominant force in Italian politics. The emperor, for the last fifty years, had chosen the popes. Now it was for the pope to choose the emperor. Whichever prince he chose, the empire of Charlemagne was beyond all possibility Of r salvation. The imperial title, already, was become a mere decoration. The pope chose the King of France the weaker of the two brothers, but the ruler of the more civilised kingdom, an intellectual, and a prince devoted to the fortunes of the Church. The choice was the signal for his rival to put all possible obstacles in his way; Louis the German and his three sons took the field. Charles, partly by arms, partly by diplomacy, circumvented them, and on Christmas Day, 875, just three-quarters of a century after the first coronation that had founded the empire in his grandfather, he too was crowned at St. Peter's. Then, disregarding the pope's appeal for aid in the holy war against the Mohammedans, he hurried back to defend his own realm against his brother and nephews. While, beyond the Alps, the new civil war continued the death of Louis the German in 876 only providing an occasion for new quarrels the pope was occupied once more with the problem of the Mohammedans, and with the chronic discontent of his own factious subjects. From Bari and Tarentum the Saracens had been lately expelled by the fleet of the eastern emperor the beginning of a Byzantine restoration in southern Italy that was to last for another two hundred years but they now found new employ in the service of the rival petty princes. Soon there was a Mohammedan garrison at Naples, another at Gaeta. The Campagna was never free from their raids and Rome itself was menaced now from the land. The pope, a man of unusual vigour and invincible spirit, organised a fleet in addition to his army. He turned admiral, and successfully: defeating the Saracens several times, destroying a fleet, and liberating hundreds of Christian captives. Also he fortified St. Paul's as Leo IV had fortified St. Peter's. In Rome itself there was a strong faction which viewed the policies of John VIII with deep misgiving the high officials whom the influence of the late emperor had forced upon the popes of the last twenty years. With the death of Louis II the opportunity had come to the pope to be rid of them. They preferred flight to the risk of what possibly awaited them, in that time where the unsuccessful politician so frequently ended his career blinded and lacking a tongue. Whereupon the pope, after in vain exhorting them to return, solemnly condemned them. Among these eminent fugitives one at least, Formosus, the Bishop of Porto, was a man of real distinction and great austerity of life. Nicholas I had employed him on a mission to Bulgaria, and the Bulgarians had wished to keep him as their primate. This the pope Adrian II, by this time refused, whereupon the disgusted Bulgarians had turned to Constantinople. As Adrian neared his end there was talk of Formosus as his successor. But another school of thought had prevailed, and the distinguished Bishop of Porto could hardly hope for favours from the candidate it succeeded in electing John VIII. At this juncture, while the exiles, returning with an army, invested Rome, Charles the Bald suddenly died (October 6, 877) and the pope, for the second time in two years, had to choose an emperor and a protector. While he hesitated, his enemies took the Leonine City and held him prisoner for thirty days, using all possible pressure to induce him to name Carloman, the senior prince of the German branch of the family. But the pope held his ground, refusing to make a decision, and finally they made off. Next, in despair, the pope made peace with the Mohammedans and sought to arrange a league of perpetual peace between the warring Carolingians. But nothing came of his great scheme; the dislocation of the ancient empire went on apace; each of the princes had more than he could successfully accomplish in the task of keeping order within the kingdom nominally subject to him; and the pope's final decision to crown as emperor Charles the Fat, the senior surviving member of the German branch of the imperial house (February 12, 881), did nothing to strengthen his own position in Rome. There his enemies were finally too much for him and on December 15, 882, they made away with him, bat