ONVERSION OF SLAVS AND NORTHMEN . . . . . . . . . . . 123

CHAPTER XII
PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN GERMANY . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

CHAPTER XIII
THE POPES AND THE REVIVAL OF THE EMPIRE . . . . . . . . . 143

CHAPTER XIV
THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

CHAPTER XV
LEARNING AND MONASTICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

CHAPTER XVI
SACRAMENTS AND LITURGIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

CHAPTER XVII THE END OF THE DARK AGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. 191

APPENDIX I
LIST OF EMPERORS AND POPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

APPENDIX II
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

{1}

THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS

CHAPTER I

THE CHURCH AND ITS PROSPECTS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: The task of the Church]

The year 461 saw the great organisation which had ruled and united
Europe for so long trembling into decay. The history of the Empire in
relation to Christianity is indeed a remarkable one. The imperial
religion had been the necessary and deadly foe of the religion of Jesus
Christ; it had fought and had been conquered. Gradually the Empire
itself with all its institutions and laws had been transformed, at
least outwardly, into a Christian power. Questions of Christian
theology had become questions of imperial politics. A Roman of the
second century would have wondered indeed at the transformation which
had come over the world he knew: it seemed as if the kingdoms of the
earth had become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. But also
it seemed that the new wine had burst the old bottles. The boundaries
of the Roman world had been outstepped: nations had come in from the
East and from the West. The {2} system which had been supreme was not
elastic: the new ideas, Christian and barbarian alike, pressed upon it
till it gave way and collapsed. And so it came about that if
Christianity had conquered the old world, it had still to conquer the
new.

[Sidenote: The decaying Empire.]

Now before the Church in the fifth century there were set several
powers, interests, duties, with which she was called upon to deal; and
her dealing with them was the work of the next five centuries. They
were,--the Empire, Christian, but obsolescent; the new nations, still
heathen, which were struggling for territory within