when they stood prepared by a long contact with the world to act more effectually on the Teutonic nations. We must now turn to view their action on the political condition of the Roman Empire during the period of its final annihilation in the West and of its decrepitude in the East.

Later ecclesiastical historians have frequently placed in a strong light the deleterious action on the clerical body of a state-system long exposed to so many corrupting influences; but they appear scarcely to have bestowed sufficient attention on the reciprocal operation of the Church in checking or remedying abuses and postponing the approaching downfall of the Imperial polity. Wholly to deny any such action would be to imagine that the principles of Christian Truth, which had operated with so much power on the social framework of the community, were unavailing in a more public sphere.

It is unquestionably true that the indefiniteness of the union between Church and State during the reign of Constantine was productive of evil consequences in so far as it offered to the priesthood almost irresistible temptations to forget primitive purity in employing their spiritual authority for mere worldly purposes: but at the same time we must remember in how many cases the clerical power thus acquired stood opposed to that of the state as mitigating the severity and injustice of an arbitrary government. It would have been surprising if, at a period when no one worthy of the title of statesman

assisted at the Imperial Councils, the exaltation of Christianity had taken place so as to preserve the necessary distinction between the influence of the clergy on their leading disciples as individuals and as rulers. We have already alluded to the moral authority possessed by the prelates over Constantine himself in matters ecclesiastical, and proof is not wanting that, not at the Capital alone but in every province of the Empire, the civil officers paid, even in the exercise of their ordinary functions, a tacit respect to the injunctions and reprimands of their spiritual guides. Without referring to such more splendid examples as the excommunication of Theodosius by Ambrose, or the successful intercession of the Bishop Flavianus with the same Emperor in behalf of the offending citizens of Antioch, we may content ourselves with the positive injunctions of two great Councils* in Spain and Gaul at the commencement of the fourth century, by one of which the civil functionary was prohibited from entering the church during the continuance of his office, and by the other was so far subject to episcopal authority as to be liable to instant excommunication if he failed to carry out on the judgment-seat the principles which in private he professed. Although such interference must have been often brought into play unwarrantably, yet, if we remember into how deep degradation the Roman administration had fallen

*The Councils of Elvira [Can. 56. ap. Routh. Rell. Sac. IV. 269. ed. 2.] (A. D 305) and Arles [Can. 7. ibid. 308.] (A.D. 314). See Neander's Church History. Vol. 1. p. 200 (Ed. Bohn).

under the Pagan Emperors, we must be convinced that it acquired a not insignificant elevation from such zealous supervision on the part of the priesthood. We shall find, moreover, that in this respect as in many others the maxims established under the Roman power were carried out even more energetically by the barbarian monarchs: for, whereas in the fourth century the censorship thus exercised by the prelates was indirect and purely ecclesiastical, the sixth beheld it, especially in Spain, occupying a recognized place in the legislation of Europe.

Indeed it may be broadly asserted that the establishment of the Christian faith by Constantine formed an era in the political as well as in the religious history of the world; for, ever since the Augustan age, the despotic power of the Emperor had been assuming a more unmitigated and revolting form; the popular spirit, which in better days would have prompted an active resistance, sunk as the vices and injustice of the court assumed a deeper dye. During no reigns had the depravity of the rulers and the political insignificance of the ruled been more apparent than in those of the predecessors and rivals of Constantine. Whatever excess of political sway, again, might fall into clerical hands, was at any rate exercised by men of fixed principles and disciplined intellects1; by men, moreover, who, as they had in general risen from the people and owed their See the testimony of the pagan Nectarius to Augustine (Aug. Ep. 90).

elevation to their intrinsic merits, could not for the most part do otherwise than act in antagonism to the caprices of hereditary tyranny.

But in order more fully to appreciate the action of the sacerdotal order on the decaying Imperial system throughout Europe, we must obtain a previous insight into the political condition of the vast Roman provinces, and review the gradual alterations introduced, more particularly in the lands of the West, by a long course of selfish mismanagement.

The whole political and social history of Rome presents an instance, to which we know no parallel, of a series of traditional maxims of statecraft carried out amid circumstances the most various and nations the most remote. The infant republic, itself a flourishing municipality, soon learnt to respect, not only the immemorial Latian customs, but its own manifest interests, by framing the constitution of every one of its subject states on the same municipal model: and the citizens of many an Italian township, while they beheld the outward machinery of government unchanged and the old social distinctions permanent as ever, might forget their dependence on the great original at Rome, or were reminded of it only by the exercise of privileges before unknown. But it could scarcely have been foreseen by the most ambitious believer in the destined supremacy of the "gens togata," that the system which had originated in the secluded valleys of central Italy was to be applied, and to all appearance successfully so, to every

one of the unpolished tribes of Western Europe. Yet so it unquestionably was, for, eight centuries after the double throne had first been raised in the Roman Forum, and a proud aristocracy had exulted over the triumph of the Senate, we find the cities of remotest Gaul groaning under the authority of as unscrupulous "duumviri,” and suffering from the increasing immunities of a more numerous senatorial order. And assuredly of all the many systems created by the ingenuity of statesmen or conquerors none was ever more secure for the superior class, and none ever more inevitably pernicious to the inferior one. The results closely consequent on the extension of Roman domination throughout Italy had been reproduced, no less fatally, over the whole surface of the Empire; and nowhere more so than in those countries from which may be traced so much of what is peculiar in modern civilization. Gaul and Spain, where the legions had experienced such a resistance as can proceed only from the energetic will of a free and united population, had been plunged into the lowest depths of misery, aggravated, rather than palliated, by the mask of a meretricious culture. In those countries, as in Italy, reformation had been rendered hopeless by the utter disappearance of the old independent agricultural class; while, in its stead, countless gangs of slaves extracted from the soil such scanty produce as can alone be looked for by the employers of compulsory labour. Among the influential classes, too, the disease was as painfully apparent. All ancient patriotism had vanished; as vanish