ishop of Constantinople, who
ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in
Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire
southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic
prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still
pagan Franks. By the time of Gregory, Clovis and his sons had extinguished
the Arian Visigoth kingdom and the Arian kingdom of Burgundy, and ruled one
Catholic kingdom of all France. Under Rechared, the Arian Visigoth kingdom
in Spain became Catholic. Gregory also announced to his friend, the
patriarch Eulogius, that the pagan Saxons in England were receiving the
Catholic faith by thousands from his missionary. The taint which the
wickedness of the eastern emperor Valens had been so mysteriously allowed
to communicate to the nascent faith of the Teuton tribes, through the
noblest of their family, the Goths, was, during the century which passed
between Pope Felix and Pope Gregory, purged away. It was decided beyond
recal that the new nations of the West should be Catholic. Five times had
Rome been taken and wasted: at one moment, it is said, all its inhabitants
had deserted it and fled. The ancient city was extinct: in and out of it
rose the Rome of the Popes, which Gregory was feeding and guarding. The
eastern emperor, who called himself the Roman prince, in recovering her had
destroyed her; but the life that was in her Pontiff was indestructible. The
ecumenical patriarch was foiled by the Servant of the servants of God: in
proportion as the eastern bishops submitted their original hierarchy, of
apostolic institution, and the graduated autonomy which each enjoyed under
it, to an imperial minister, termed a patriarch, in Constantinople, all the
bishops of the West, placed as they were under distinct kingdoms, found
their common centre, adviser, champion, and ruler in the Chair of Peter,
fixed in a ruined Rome. If Gregory, in his daily distress, thought that the
end of the world was coming, all subsequent ages have felt that in him the
world of the future was already founded. In the two centuries since the
death of the great Theodosius, the countries which form modern Europe had
passed through indescribable disturbance, a misery without
end--dislodgement of the old proprietors, a settlement of new inhabitants
and rulers. The Christian religion itself had receded for a time far within
the limits which it had o