CHAPTER XIX CONDITIONS AMONG THE PEOPLES WHO CONQUERED THE ROMAN EMPIRE-IRISH SACRIFICED FIRST BORN -THE WERGELD-THE SALIC LAW-CODE OF THE VISIGOTHS ON EXPOSED CHILDREN-THEODORIC AND CASSIODORUS. W ITH Church and State united in defence of the child's right to live, we turn to the barbaric hordes that were then en filading the Roman civilization. For the first time in the history of man the religious law was the same as the civil law, and for the first time in the history of man both represented human law. With Diocletian's division of the Empire into four almost equal parts under two Augusti and two Cæsars, there was frank acknowledgment that the great Roman Empire was at an end. With him, too, ended the fiction of a popular sovereignty. The Roman Emperor became an Eastern despot. He was no longer a man of the people easily to be seen and showing his democracy in frequent unofficial parade. He was now a secluded person wearing the dress of the Orientals, surrounded by servile officials; First Missionary Efforts 273 and the Orientalism of the government went further when Constantine, at the farthest limit of Europe, built a new city, Constantinople, named after himself. Nominally it was but to divide with Rome the honours of being the capital; in reality it was to dim the even now fading lustre of the Seven Hills. From the frontiers of China to the Baltic there came pressing down on the fast disintegrating Roman Empire armies of barbarians. Amid all the disorder, the calamities without number, when civilization, science, and the arts were all obscured, the Church gained strength, its tenets held sway, its humanities were accepted as the conquerors in their turn became the conquered. The Christian religion slowly gripped them all as out of the convulsions of government there was born the modern Europe. To the Romans and their adopted allies it was a world of terror-to the Christians it was a friendly world, for the barbarians were known to the Church long before they were known to the soldiers who tried to repulse them. I It has been the fashion to decry the value of the check that the Church put on the barbarous tribes in the early part of the Christian era. Up to the very door of the Church there was, it is true, slaughter-there it stopped. Had it not been for the Church upholding what it did of civilization and humanity, it is difficult to say what would I 1 S. A. Dunham, Europe in the Middle Ages, p. 8. have been the outcome of the hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gephids, Longobards, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons who, at one time or another, fell upon Rome. But from the third century these invaders in their very triumph came face to face with a moral force that checked them as no army could, softened their manners, and uniting their rude strength with the last remains of the glory of Rome, gave to the world the civilized nations that now practically control both hemispheres. Of the first missionary efforts little is known. Jesus himself had said, "Go ye therefore and teach all nations. . . . Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you," and was indeed himself the first missionary of the new faith. Of his immediate followers only three undertook missionary work. After the death of Jesus, the Apostles scattered over the whole world. "Thomas," says Eusebius, "received Parthia as his alloted region; Andrew received Scythia, and John, Asia. . . . .. Peter appears to have preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia. . . and Paul spread the Gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum.' 112 From another source we are told that Matthew went into Æthiopia, but in the following century there is little light as to who were the missionaries; but that they were everywhere successful is shown 2 Matthew xxviii., 19, 20. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, book iii., chapter i. |