dly; it grew fat on the wages of sin. "Abandoned profligates, who
had passed their days in the most enormous pursuits, and whose guilty
consciences filled them with terror and remorse, were comforted with the
delusive hopes of obtaining pardon, and making atonement for their
crimes by leaving the greatest part of their fortune to some monastic
society. Multitudes, impelled by the unnatural dictates of a gloomy
superstition, deprived their children of fertile lands and rich
patrimonies in favour of the monks, by whose prayers they hoped to
render the Deity propitious" (p. 161). The only new sect of any
importance in this century is that of the Monothelites, later known as
Maronites; they taught that Christ had but one will, but the doctrine is
wrapped up in so many subtleties as to be almost incomprehensible. They
were condemned, in the sixth General Council, held at Constantinople,
A.D. 680. It was during this century that "Boniface V. enacted that
infamous law, by which the churches became places of refuge to all who
fled thither for protection; a law which procured a sort of impunity to
the most enormous crimes, and gave a loose rein to the licentiousness of
the most abandoned profligates" (p. 164). The effect of this law was
that the monasteries became the refuge of bandits and murderers, who
issued from them to plunder and to destroy, and paid for the security of
their persons by bestowing on their hosts a portion of the spoil they
had collected during their raids. Such were the civilizing and purifying
effects of Christianity.

CENTURY VIII.

Winfred, better known as Boniface, "the Apostle of Germany," is,
perhaps, the chief ecclesiastical figure of this century. He taught
Christianity right through Germany; was consecrated bishop in A.D. 723,
created archbishop in A.D. 738, and Primate of Germany and Belgium in
A.D. 746; in A.D. 755 he was murdered in Friesland, with fifty other
ecclesiastics. Much stress is laid upon his martyrdom by Christian
writers, but Boniface, after all, only received from the Frieslanders
the measure he had meted out to their brethren, and there seems no good
reason why Christian missionaries should claim a monopoly of the right
to kill. Mosheim allows that he "often employed violence and terror, and
sometimes artifice and fraud" (p. 169) in order to gain converts, and he
was supported by Charles Martel, the enemy of Friesland, and appeared
among the Germans as the friend and agent of