ure
and meritorious; their present reward consisted in the testimony of
their conscience and the respect of a grateful people; but the fruitful
harvest of their toils was inherited and enjoyed by the proud and
wealthy prelates of succeeding times. The first conversions were free
and spontaneous: a holy life and an eloquent tongue were the only arms
of the missionaries; but the domestic fables of the Pagans were silenced
by the miracles and visions of the strangers; and the favorable temper
of the chiefs was accelerated by the dictates of vanity and interest.
The leaders of nations, who were saluted with the titles of kings and
saints, held it lawful and pious to impose the Catholic faith on their
subjects and neighbors; the coast of the Baltic, from Holstein to the
Gulf of Finland, was invaded under the standard of the cross; and the
reign of idolatry was closed by the conversion of Lithuania in the
fourteenth century. Yet truth and candor must acknowledge, that the
conversion of the North imparted many temporal benefits both to the old
and the new Christians. The rage of war, inherent to the human species,
could not be healed by the evangelic precepts of charity and peace; and
the ambition of Catholic princes has renewed in every age the calamities
of hostile contention. But the admission of the Barbarians into the
pale of civil and ecclesiastical society delivered Europe from the
depredations, by sea and land, of the Normans, the Hungarians, and
the Russians, who learned to spare their brethren and cultivate their
possessions. The establishment of law and order was promoted by the
influence of the clergy; and the rudiments of art and science were
introduced into the savage countries of the globe. The liberal piety
of the Russian princes engaged in their service the most skilful of the
Greeks, to decorate the cities and instruct the inhabitants: the dome
and the paintings of St. Sophia were rudely copied in the churches of
Kiow and Novogorod: the writings of the fathers were translated into
the Sclavonic idiom; and three hundred noble youths were invited or
compelled to attend the lessons of the college of Jaroslaus. It should
appear that Russia might have derived an early and rapid improvement
from her peculiar connection with the church and state of
Constantinople, which at that age so justly despised the ignorance of
the Latins. But the Byzantine nation was servile, solitary, and verging
to a hasty decline: after the