hair fifteen years, from 468 to 483; and such
was the outlook presented to him in the East and West--an outlook of ruin,
calamity, and suffering in those vast provinces which make our present
Europe--an outlook of anxiety with a prospect of ever-increasing evil in
the yet surviving eastern empire. There was not then a single ruler holding
the Catholic faith. Basiliscus and Zeno were not only heretical themselves,
but they were assuming in their own persons the right of the secular power
to dictate to the Church her own belief. And the Pope had become their
subject while he was locally subject to the dominion of a northern
commander of mercenaries, himself a Herule and an Arian. In his own Rome
the Pope lived and breathed on sufferance. Under Zeno he saw the East torn
to pieces with dissension; prelates put into the sees of Alexandria and
Antioch by the arm of power; that arm itself directed by the ambitious
spirit of a Byzantine bishop, who not only named the holders of the second
and third seats of the Church, but reduced them to do his bidding, and wait
upon his upstart throne. Gaul was in the hand of princes, mostly Arian, one
pagan. Spain was dominated by Sueves and Visigoths, both Arian. In Africa
Simplicius during forty years had been witness of the piracies of Genseric,
making the Mediterranean insecure, and the cities on every coast liable to
be sacked and burnt by his flying freebooters, while the great church of
Africa, from the death of St. Augustine, had been suffering a persecution
so severe that no heathen emperor had reached the standard of Arian
cruelty. In Britain, civilisation and faith had been alike trampled out by
the northern pirates Hengist and Horsa, and successive broods of their
like. The Franks, still pagan, had advanced from the north of Gaul to its
centre, destroyers as yet of the faith which they were afterwards to
embrace. What did the Pope still possess in these populations? The common
people, a portion of the local proprietors, and the Catholic bishops who
had in him their common centre, as he in them men regarded with veneration
by the still remaining Catholic population.

In all this there is one fact so remarkable as to claim special mention.
How had it happened that the Catholic faith was considered throughout the
West the mark of the Roman subject; and the Arian misbelief the mark of the
Teuton invader and governor? Theodosius had put an end to the official
Arianism of the East, which