key-note of all Christian apologies in after-time. The Pagans can make no reply. They have lost all heart and all faith. The tradition of their ancient superstitions, driven from the cities and chief resorts of men, still lingers in the fields and the villages. The last vestiges of their worship still appear here or there faintly and dubiously for centuries; but the old living faith of Jupiter and Saturn, of Astarte and Mithras, has ceased to be a power in the world from this time forever.

The triumph, however, of Christianity was not unalloyed. We dare not congratulate ourselves upon it as on a pure victory of truth over falsehood. It must be allowed that the apparent success of the Gospel was gained in a great degree by the surrender of the distinctive purity of the Gospel. At an earlier period, when many of the doctors and preachers of the Church had been themselves converted to the faith from the schools of the philosophers, it had been usual with them to recommend it to their former associates as a higher revelation in metaphysical and moral science. Doubtless Justin and Clement and Origen had made some sacrifice of the simplicity of the Gospel in their earnest endeavor to smooth the way to its reception among the more enlightened classes of Pagan society. The danger into which their successors fell lay in another direction. The Church in the fourth century had to attract and to retain the masses of the population. It allowed itself to make in turn too large a concession to their vulgar prejudices. The Pagan multitude would never, perhaps, have surrendered to the Christian faith, from which they held so long aloof, had not the Christian churches been encouraged to offer them an outward pomp and ceremonial, adopted mainly from the Pagan itself. The doctrines of the Gospel were merged, its severe and lofty precepts were involved, in a parade of lights, incense, vestments, pictures, images, and votive offerings, which made the passage from nominal Paganism to a Christianity hardly less nominal easy and imperceptible. It can be shown but too plainly that the readiest way to secure the transfer of a Pagan temple to the Christian services was to place it under the invocation of the Saints and of the Virgin Mary. There were not wanting high-souled puritans in that day who protested against this dangerous trifling; but their voice was too generally overruled. The patrons of a corrupt reaction were honored and magnified. Vigilantius was denounced; Jerome was canonized.

No system, indeed, of moral and religious teaching could fail to be vulgarized and degraded by the adhesion to it of the mass of weak and vicious humanity. The mass of the Pagan world at this period was peculiarly debased. The Greek and Roman races were, in fact, morally exhausted. They had lost their elasticity, and all

CHAP. LXXVII. TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY.

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power of intellectual rejuvenescence. The trial to which the spirit of the Gospel was now subjected was indeed fearful one. The Church has never yet thoroughly leavened the body of her nominal adherents. Nevertheless she has done enough to vindicate her claim to be the best regenerator of society. She has conquered for herself a people of stronger moral fibre in the barbarians from whom modern society has since sprung, and has moulded them to a high'er sense of morals and religion than any before them. Baffled as she still is at every turn by the inherent corruption of human nature, she has nevertheless succeeded in setting up a standard of truth and justice, of purity and mercy, to which all men revert on every emergency, which all men profess at least to regard with respect and acquiescence. None can deny that since the fall of Rome and of Roman superstition the world generally has recognized a holier moral rule, and embraced a loftier conception of man's nature and destiny. The fall of Rome is still the greatest event in all secular history.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

The Western provinces become generally independent of the empire.-Roman culture lingers in Gaul and Spain. -The Visigoths and Burgundians settle in Gaul.-Revolt and fall of Heraclianus in Africa.-Kingdom of the Visigoths in the North of Spain.-Honorius is supported by his general Constantius, whose son, Valentinian III., succeeds to the empire under the agency of his mother Placidia.-Aetius the patrician, "the last of the Romans."-Treason of Count Bonifacius.-Genseric and the Vandals invited into Africa, which they subdue.-Attila and the Huns invade Gaul, and are repulsed by Aetius.-Battle of Chalons, A. D. 451.-Massacre at Cologne. --Attila invades Italy. -Leo the pope saves Rome.-Death of Attila.-Valentinian assassinates Aetius.-Maximus emperor.-The empress Eudoxia invites Genseric to attack Italy.-Sack of Rome by the Vandals, A.D. 455. -Avitus emperor.-Ricimer the Sueve bestows the purple first on Majorianus, afterwards on Severus.-The empire now limited to Italy only.-The emperor Anthemius supposed to have leaned towards the Pagans.-Ricimer captures Rome for the third time, A.D. 472.-He makes Glycerius emperor, and lastly Romulus, surnamed Augustulus.-The barbarian Odoacer extinguishes the empire of the West, A.D. 476.

WE have reviewed the history of Rome from her rise and progress to her decline and fall. The vast empire which she has acquired has been lost to her. A rival capital rules one half of her ancient dominions. The emperors of the West have ceased to reside in her, and make her the centre of their authority. What remains of the empire of the West is ruled from a court at Milan,

or now more commonly at Ravenna. Rome herself has been entered and sacked by the barbarians. Italy has been overrun by an irresistible invader. It remains in the power of the Goths to determine whether the city of the Caesars shall become the capital of a new barbarian empire, or be abandoned to the contempt of the world and the progress of natural decline. But the influence of the name of Rome has survived her intrinsic power. She has yet another turn in her career to experience before the period of ancient history comes to a close, and Europe enters upon the development of new ideas and new political combinations.

Alaric, at his death, left the great Gothic host encamped at the southern extremity of Italy, where it had been just baffled in an attempt to cross over into Sicily. The chiefship of the nation descended from him to Ataulphus, his wife's brother, by military election. This man was no vulgar barbarian. So deeply was he impressed with the dignity of the Roman government, and the complexity of the institutions wherewith it sustained the civilization of the age, that he shrank from quartering upon Italy a swarm of savage conquerors, and refrained from establishing his own camp in Rome. "There was a time," he is reported to have said, "when I aspired to make the ancient capital of the world my own capital, to convert Romania into a Gothia, to call myself no longer Ataulphus, but Cæsar Augustus; but I have discovered that the barbarians can never be subjected to civil institutions, my Goths can never be made Romans. Society shall not perish. I will restore the Roman Empire, and protect, but not rule it." He was inspired, it is said, with this noble resolution by Placidia, the daughter of Theodosius, who had fallen into the hands of the invaders at Rome, and with whom he had united himself in marriage. The resolution itself betokens the power which the great city exercised over the imaginations of mankind, even of the foreigner and the barbarian, and their strong conviction that there was something transcendent and sacred in its authority, with which no other could be put in competition. Ataulphus withdrew from Italy, and set up his throne at Barcino, in Spain, and more constantly at Narbo, in Southern Gaul. He established a permanent kingdom of the Visigoths on the coast of the Mediterranean, but he surrendered Rome to the Roman emperor, as its legitimate sovereign; and while he styled himself King of the Visigoths, did not pretend to withdraw the conquered Romans from their allegiance to Honorius, as emperor over both himself and them. He regarded the wretched Attalus as an instrument and a failure, and contemptuously thrust him aside, first bringing him away with him to Barcino, and afterwards giving him up to Honorius. The kingdom of the Visigoths rudely foreshadowed.

CHAP. LXXVII. THE RISE OF THE PAPACY.

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the fiefs of the feudal vassals of a later age. It sprang from the same Teutonic soil, and was due, perhaps, to the same cast of political ideas, from which so much of the polity of modern Europe has actually derived its shape and character.

Thus the history of ancient Rome enters upon a new phase, brief, indeed, but offering at least for a moment some promise of dignity and prosperity. The Christian panegyrists of Honorius speak in glowing terms of the revival of his authority and power; and though the coloring of these sectarians may be liable to just suspicion, it would really seem that the empire after its recent degradation did enjoy at least a partial revival. The influence over men's minds which she lost by the withdrawal of the sun of imperial splendor she regained by the enhanced authority of her bishops, who now reigned almost supreme in the city, over a population very generally devoted to them. The dignity of the pope of Rome became more eminent from the eclipse under which the Church and its rulers suffered in the Western provinces, overcome as they now were by successive swarms of barbarians, some heathen and others heretical. They seem to have framed their ecclesiastical policy with a steady view to the eventual aggrandizement of their see; but the rise of the Papacy, which is perhaps the most marked feature of the century, was still more due to their actual position, as spiritual heirs to a secular power which had abdicated its actual responsibilities. The history of modern Europe was about to be inaugurated by a great spiritual revival, of which Rome was to be once more the centre.

Modern Rome was about to be born; but its birth does not lie within our purview. We may return for a moment to the state of the Western provinces before we cast a glance upon the fate of the Western Empire itself. The Visigoths, under Ataulphus, established some kind of regular government in the north of Spain and the south of Gaul; but ruder hordes of Sueves and Alans, Vandals and Burgundians, overran the greater part of both those extensive regions, their chiefs ever shifting their camps from one quarter to another, engaged first in the plunder of the natives, and when that was exhausted in conflict with one another. The provincials, who were now generally known by the name of Romans, and who had, indeed, adapted their speech and manners to the Roman type for many generations, found themselves abandoned by the emperor, and were not ill-pleased, perhaps, for the most part, to accept the rule of their new masters, which might be lighter, and could hardly be heavier, than the fiscal tyranny of the imperial administration. The best literature of the day still flourished in Gaul and Spain. Ausonius and Rutilius, Prosper, Avitus, and Salvian did honor to the one country, Orosius and Prudentius

to the other. The barbarians were not insensible to the charms of poetry and eloquence; they were captivated by the luxuries of Roman society; they were awed by the strength and subtilty of Roman jurisprudence; they embraced with peculiar readiness the conceptions of municipal government established in the provinces. Whether they brought with them a rudimentary system of law and politics of their own, as their descendants of the present day somewhat boldly contend, or whether they simply adopted the principles of Roman society around them, they showed at least remarkable aptitude for social and civic life. But as yet they allowed themselves no repose to make progress in the arts of peace. While paying for the most part a nominal acknowledgment to the imperial sovereign at Ravenna, they exercised all the rights of sovereignty freely among themselves; and it was only by purchasing their services, and employing them one against another, that he could prevent them from settling down into established and permanent governments.

While the barbarians were thus spreading themselves as it were in a thin layer over the surface of the general population, and acknowledging the nominal supremacy of the titular emperor at Ravenna, there arose various usurpers among the provincials themselves, who assumed the purple, and suffered themselves to be proclaimed, each in a different corner of the West, emperors, not of Britain or Gaul or Spain, but of Rome. Thus Gratianus was proclaimed emperor in Britain, but was speedily supplanted by Constantinus, who crossed the strait in the year 407, and after receiving some adhesions from the soldiery in Gaul, passed rapidly into Spain. This success, however rapid, was but momentary. Honorius was able to send against him an officer named Constantius, who captured him at Arles, and sent him to his master, by whom he was put to death, together with his son Julianus. It is mentioned that in his last extremity he had hastily taken holy orders; but this device did not save him. He had shown, it was remarked, no religious scruples himself, for he had stripped the monk's cowl and gown from another son, Constans, in order to invest him with the purple. Constans was slain by an officer of his own named Gerontius, and Gerontius in his turn was overpowered by Constantius. Gerontius had set up a new emperor in Spain named Maximus, who maintained for some years a precarious position in the midst of the Romans and barbarians, but fell at last into the hands of Honorius. To these pretenders may be added Jovinus, a Roman magnate of the country of the Arverni in Gaul, who assumed the diadem at Moguntiacum on the Rhine. In 411 this man was said to have formed a fleeting alliance with Ataulphus, and to have invited him into Gaul. But

A.D. 411.