g the society and the polity of the ancient world. It had
arrested for a time the decline of the empire, but after the Arian
separation it could not prevent its fall. The Catholics could not
dissociate the interests of the Church and those of the Roman State, and
looked with patriotic as well as religious horror at the barbarians by
whom the work of destruction was done. They could not see that they had
come to build up as well as to destroy, and that they supplied a field
for the exercise of all that influence which had failed among the
Romans. It was very late before they understood that the world had run
but half its course; that a new skin had been prepared to contain the
new wine; and that the barbarous tribes were to justify their claim to
the double inheritance of the faith and of the power of Rome. There were
two principal things which fitted them for their vocation. The Romans
had been unable to be the instruments of the social action of
Christianity on account of their moral depravity. It was precisely for
those virtues in which they were most deficient that their barbarous
enemies were distinguished. Salvianus expresses this in the following
words (_De Gubern. Dei_, vii. 6): "Miramur si terrae ... nostrorum
omnium a Deo barbaris datae sunt, cum eas quae Romani polluerant
fornicatione, nunc mundent barbari castitate?"[316] Whilst thus their
habits met half-way the morality of the Christian system, their
mythology, which was the very crown and summit of all pagan religions,
predisposed them in like manner for its adoption, by predicting its own
end, and announcing the advent of a system which was to displace its
gods. "It was more than a mere worldly impulse," says a famous northern
divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek,
like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on
the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its
progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonderful facility with
which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in
the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their
history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that
they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of
civilisation was in every way retarded, the virtues together with the
ignorance of the barbarous State.

At a time when Arianism was extinct in the empire, it assumed among the
T