g creeds hopelessly impossible. In
Africa, the Vandal kings set on foot a persecution of their Catholic
subjects which rivalled, nay exceeded, the horrors of the persecution
under Diocletian. Churches were destroyed, bishops banished, and their
flocks forbidden to elect their successors: nay, sometimes, in the
fierce quest after hidden treasure, eminent ecclesiastics were stretched
on the rack, their mouths were filled with noisome dirt, or cords were
twisted round their foreheads or their shins. In Gaul, under the
Visigothic King Euric, the persecution was less savage, but it was
stubborn and severe. Here, too, the congregations were forbidden to
elect successors to their exiled bishops; the paths to the churches were
stopped up with thorns and briers; cattle grazed on the grass-grown
altar steps, and the rain came through the shattered roofs into the
dismantled basilicas.

Thus all round the shores of the Mediterranean there was strife and
bitter heart-burning between the Roman provincial and his Teutonic
"guest", not so much because one was or called himself a Roman, while
the other called himself Goth, Burgundian, or Vandal, but because one
was Athanasian and the other Arian. With this strife of creeds
Theodoric, for the greater part of his reign, refused to concern
himself. He remained an Arian, as his fathers had been before him, but
he protected the Catholic Church in the privileges which she had
acquired, and he refused to exert his royal authority to either threaten
or allure men into adopting his creed. So evenly for many years did he
hold the balance between the rival faiths, that it was reported of him
that he put to death a Catholic priest who apostatised to Arianism in
order to attain the royal favour; and though this story does not perhaps
rest on sufficient authority, there can be no doubt that the general
testimony of the marvelling Catholic subjects of Theodoric would have
coincided with that already quoted (See page 128.) from the Bishop of
Ravenna that "he attempted nothing against the Catholic faith".

Still, though determined not to govern in the interests of a sect, it
was impossible that Theodoric's political relations should not be, to a
certain extent, modified by his religious affinities. Let us glance at
the position of the chief States with which a ruler of Italy at the
close of the fifth century necessarily came in contact.

First of all we have _the Empire,_ practically confined at this