ve way when he saw the eastern emperor resume the policy of a
Catholic sovereign. He put on the savage again, and he ended with the
murder not only of his own long-trusted ministers, but of the Pope, who
refused to be his instrument in procuring immunity for heresy from a
Catholic emperor.

At his death, overclouded with the pangs of remorse, the Arian rule which
he had fostered with so much skill showed itself to have no hold upon an
Italy to which he had given a great temporal prosperity. The Goths, whom he
had seemed to tame, were found incapable of self-government, and every
Roman heart welcomed Belisarius and Narses as the restorers of a power
which had not ceased to claim their allegiance, even through the turpitudes
and betrayals of Zeno and Anastasius.

The best solution which I know for this wonderful result, brought about in
so many countries, is contained in a few words of Gibbon: "Under the Roman
empire the wealth and jurisdiction of the bishops, their sacred character
and perpetual office, their numerous dependents, popular eloquence and
provincial assemblies, had rendered them always respectable and sometimes
dangerous. Their influence was augmented by the progress of superstition"
(by which he means the Catholic faith), "and the establishment of the
French monarchy may in some degree be ascribed to the firm alliance of a
hundred prelates who reigned in the discontented or independent cities of
Gaul."[212] But how were these prelates bound together in a firm alliance?
Because each one of them felt what a chief among them, St. Avitus, under
an Arian prince, expressed to the Roman senate in the matter of Pope
Symmachus by the direction of his brother bishops, that in the person of
the Bishop of Rome the principate of the whole Church was touched; that "in
the case of other bishops, if there be any lapse, it may be restored; but
if the Pope of Rome is endangered, not one bishop but the episcopate itself
will seem to be shaken".[213] If the bishops had been all that is above
described with the exception of this one thing, the common bond which held
them to Rome, how would the ruin of their country, the subversion of
existing interests, the confiscation of the land, the imposition of foreign
invaders for masters, have acted upon them? It would have split them up
into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour.
The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling
th