That, he says, is the
cause of their strength and our weakness. We, professing orthodoxy, are
profligate hypocrites. They, half heathens, half Arians, are honester
men, purer men than we. There is no use, he says, in despising the Goths
as heretics, while they are better men than we. They are better
Christians than the Romans, because they are better men. They pray to
God for success, and trust in him, and we presumptuously trust in
ourselves. We swear by Christ: but what do we do but blaspheme him, when
we swear 'Per Christum tollo eum,' 'I will make away with him,' 'Per
Christum hunc jugulo,' 'I will cut his throat,' and then believe
ourselves bound to commit the murder which we have vowed? . . . 'The
Saxons,' he says, 'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman,
the Huns shameless. But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours? Is
the Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a
Christian's? If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder? He is
utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood. But what of the
Christian who does the same? The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better men
than the Christians. The Goths,' he says, 'are perfidious, but chaste.
The Alans unchaste, but less perfidious. The Franks are liars, but
hospitable; the Saxons ferociously cruel, but venerable for their
chastity. The Visigoths who conquered Spain,' he says, 'were the most
"ignavi" (heavy, I presume he means, and loutish) of all the barbarians:
but they were chaste, and therefore they conquered.'

In Africa, if we are to believe Salvian, things stood even worse, at the
time of the invasion of the Vandals. In his violent invectives against
the Africans, however, allowance must be made. Salvian was a great lover
of monks; and the Africans used, he says, to detest them, and mob them
wherever they appeared; for which offence, of course, he can find no
words too strong. St. Augustine, however, himself a countryman of
theirs, who died, happily, just before the storm burst on that hapless
land, speaks bitterly of their exceeding profligacy--of which he himself
in his wild youth, had had but too sad experience. Salvian's assertion
is, that the Africans were the most profligate of all the Romans; and
that while each barbarian tribe had (as we have just seen) some good in
them, the Africans had none.

But there were noble souls left among them, lights which shone all the
more brightly in the surround