and Christians were inhumanly massacred in the
church. Worms perished after a long and obstinate siege; Strasburgh,
Spires, Rheims, Tournay, Arras, Amiens, experienced the cruel oppression
of the German yoke; and the consuming flames of war spread from the
banks of the Rhine over the greatest part of the seventeen provinces of
Gaul. That rich and extensive country, as far as the ocean, the Alps,
and the Pyrenees, was delivered to the Barbarians, who drove before
them, in a promiscuous crowd, the bishop, the senator, and the
virgin, laden with the spoils of their houses and altars. [91] The
ecclesiastics, to whom we are indebted for this vague description of the
public calamities, embraced the opportunity of exhorting the Christians
to repent of the sins which had provoked the Divine Justice, and to
renounce the perishable goods of a wretched and deceitful world. But
as the Pelagian controversy, [92] which attempts to sound the abyss
of grace and predestination, soon became the serious employment of
the Latin clergy, the Providence which had decreed, or foreseen, or
permitted, such a train of moral and natural evils, was rashly weighed
in the imperfect and fallacious balance of reason. The crimes, and the
misfortunes, of the suffering people, were presumptuously compared with
those of their ancestors; and they arraigned the Divine Justice, which
did not exempt from the common destruction the feeble, the guiltless,
the infant portion of the human species. These idle disputants
overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace
with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valor. The timid
and selfish policy of the court of Ravenna might recall the Palatine
legions for the protection of Italy; the remains of the stationary
troops might be unequal to the arduous task; and the Barbarian
auxiliaries might prefer the unbounded license of spoil to the benefits
of a moderate and regular stipend. But the provinces of Gaul were filled
with a numerous race of hardy and robust youth, who, in the defence of
their houses, their families, and their altars, if they had dared to
die, would have deserved to vanquish. The knowledge of their native
country would have enabled them to oppose continual and insuperable
obstacles to the progress of an invader; and the deficiency of the
Barbarians, in arms, as well as in discipline, removed the only pretence
which excuses the submission of a populous country to the inferio