e who are present, by lustre of your
diadem, upon those who are absent, by the glory of your name. We are
touched by your happiness; as often as you fight in those (heretical)
lands, _we_ conquer".

The use of language like this, showing such earnest devotion to the
cause of Clovis in the subject of a rival monarch, well illustrates the
tendency of the Frankish king's conversion to loosen the bonds of
loyalty in the neighbouring States, and to facilitate the spread of his
dominion over the whole of Gaul. In fact, the Frankish kingdom, having
become Catholic, was like the magnetic mountain of Oriental fable, which
drew to itself all the iron nails of the ships which approached it, and
so caused them to sink in hopeless dissolution. Seeing this obvious
result of the conversion of the Frank, some historians, especially in
the last century, were disposed to look upon that conversion as a mere
hypocritical pretence. Later critics[95] have shown that this is not an
accurate account of the matter. Doubtless the motives which induced
Clovis to accept baptism and to profess faith in the Crucified One were
of the meanest, poorest, and most unspiritual kind. Few men have ever
been further from that which Christ called "the Kingdom of Heaven" than
this grasping and brutal Frankish chief, to whom robbery, falsehood,
murder were, after his baptism, as much as before it (perhaps even more
than before it), the ordinary steps in the ladder of his elevation. But
the rough barbaric soul had in its dim fashion a faith that the God of
the Christians was the mightiest God, and that it would go well with
those who submitted to him. In his rude style he made imaginary bargains
with the Most High: "so much reverence to 'Clotilda's God,' so many
offerings at the shrine of St. Martin, so much land to the church of St.
Genovefa, on condition that I shall beat down my enemies before me and
extend my dominions from the Seine to the Pyrenees". This is the kind of
calculation which the missionaries in our own day are only too well
accustomed to hear from the lips of barbarous potentates like those of
Uganda and Fiji. A conversion thus effected brings no honour to any
church, and the utter selfishness and even profanity of the transaction
disgusts the devout souls of every communion. Still the conversion of
Clovis was not in its essence and origin a hypocritical scheme for
obtaining the support of the Catholic clergy in Gaul, how clearly so
ever the ne