had so troubled the empire, and so attacked the
Primacy in the period between Constantine and himself. During all that time
the Arian heresy had no root in the West. But the emperor Valens, when
chosen as a colleague by his brother Valentinian I., in 364, was counted a
Catholic. A few years later he fell under the influence of Eudoxius, who
had got by his favour the see of Byzantium. This man, one of the worst
leaders of the Arians, taught and baptised Valens, and filled him with his
own spirit; and Valens, when he settled the Goths in the northern provinces
by the Danube, stipulated that they should receive the Arian doctrine.
Their bishop and great instructor Ulphilas had been deceived, it is said,
into believing that it was the doctrine of the Church. This fatal gift of
a spurious doctrine the Goth received in all the energy of an uninstructed
but vigorous will. As the leader of the northern races he communicated it
to them. A Byzantine bishop had poisoned the wells of the Christian faith
from which the great new race of the future was to drink, and when
Byzantium succeeded in throwing Alaric upon the West, all the races which
followed his lead brought with them the doctrine which Ulphilas had been
deceived into propagating as the faith of Christ. So it happened that if
the terrible overthrow of Valens in 378 by the nation which he had deceived
brought his persecution with his reign to an end in the East, yet through
his act Arianism came into possession, a century later, of all but one of
the newly set up thrones in the West.

In truth, at the time the western empire fell the Catholic Church was
threatened with the loss of everything which, down to the time of St. Leo,
she had gained. For the triumph which Constantine's conversion had
announced, for the unity of faith which her own Councils had maintained
from Nicaea to Chalcedon, she seemed to have before her subjection to a
terrible despotism in the East, extinction by one dominant heresy in the
West. For here it was not a crowd of heresies which surrounded her, but the
secular power at Rome, at Carthage, at Toulouse and Bordeaux, at Seville
and Barcelona, spoke Arian. Who was to recover the Goth, the Vandal, the
Burgundian, the Sueve, the Aleman, the Ruge, from that fatal error?
Moreover, her bounds had receded. Saxon and Frank had largely swept away
the Christian faith in their respective conquests. Who was to restore it to
them? The Rome which had planted her co