politan of Constantinople was becoming a
helpless instrument in the hands of the Byzantine emperor; the Bishop of
Rome was becoming an independent potentate. He took an authoritative and
decisive part in the controversy formally ended at the Council of
Chalcedon; it was he who stayed the advance of Attila. Leo and his
predecessor, Innocent, laid the foundations of the spiritual monarchy of
the West.

In the latter half of the fifth century, the disintegration of the
Western Empire by the hosts of Teutonic invaders was being completed.
These races assimilated certain aspects of Christian morals and assumed
Christianity without assimilating the intellectual subtleties of the
Eastern Church, and for the most part in consequence adopted the Arian
form. But when the Frankish horde descended, Clovis accepted the
orthodox theology, thereby in effect giving it permanence and
obliterating Arianism in the West. Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy,
in nominal subjection to the emperor, was the last effective upholder of
toleration for his own Arian creed. Almost simultaneous with his death
was the accession of Justinian to the empire. The re-establishment of
effective imperial sway in Italy reduced the papacy to a subordinate
position. The recovery was the work of Gregory I., the Great; but papal
opposition to Gothic or Lombard dominion in Italy destroyed the prospect
of political unification for the peninsula.

Western monasticism had been greatly extended and organised by Benedict
of Nursia and his rule--comprised in silence, humility, and obedience.
Monasticism became possessed of the papal chair in the person of Gregory
the Great. Of noble descent and of great wealth, which he devoted to
religious uses as soon as he became master of it, he had also the
characteristics which were held to denote the highest holiness. In
austerity, devotion, and imaginative superstition, he, whose known
virtue and capacity caused him to be forced into the papal chair,
remained a monk to the end of his days.

But he became at once an exceedingly vigorous man of affairs. He
reorganised the Roman liturgy; he converted the Lombards and Saxons. And
he proved himself virtual sovereign of Rome. His administration was
admirable. He exercised his disciplinary authority without fear or
favour. And his rule marks the epoch at which all that we regard as
specially characteristic of mediaeval Christianity--its ethics, its
asceticism, its sacerdotalism, and