itself;
the Goths of Gainas entered Constantinople, though only to be
overwhelmed and slaughtered round the vain asylum of their burning
church.

[Sidenote: (2.) In the West.]

In the next century the Teutonic conquest of the West gave Arianism
another lease of power. Once more the heresy was supreme in Italy, and
Spain, and Africa. Once more it held and lost the future of the world.
To the barbarian as well as to the heathen it was a half-way halt upon
the road to Christianity; and to the barbarian also it was nothing but a
source of weakness. It lived on and in its turn perpetuated the feud
between the Roman and the Teuton which caused the destruction of the
earlier Teutonic kingdoms in Western Europe. The provincials or their
children might forget the wrongs of conquest, but heresy was a standing
insult to the Roman world. Theodoric the Ostrogoth may rank with the
greatest statesmen of the Empire, yet even Theodoric found his Arianism
a fatal disadvantage. And if the isolation of heresy fostered the
beginnings of a native literature, it also blighted every hope of future
growth. The Goths were not inferior to the English, but there is nothing
in Gothic history like the wonderful burst of power which followed the
conversion of the English. There is no Gothic writer to compare with
Bede or Caedmon. Jordanis is not much to set against them, and even
Jordanis was not an Arian.

[Sidenote: Fall of Teutonic Arianism.]

The sword of Belisarius did but lay open the internal disunion of Italy
and Africa. A single blow destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals, and all
the valour of the Ostrogoths could only win for theirs a downfall of
heroic grandeur. Sooner or later every Arian nation had to purge itself
of heresy or vanish from the earth. Even the distant Visigoths
[Sidenote: 589.] were forced to see that Arians could not hold Spain.
The Lombards in Italy were the last defenders of the hopeless cause, and
they too yielded a few years later to the efforts of Pope Gregory and
Queen Theudelinda. [Sidenote: 599.] Of Continental Teutons, the Franks
alone escaped the divisions of Arianism. In the strength of orthodoxy
they drove the Goths before them on the field of Vougle, [Sidenote:
507.] and brought the green standard of the Prophet to a halt upon the
Loire. [Sidenote: 732.] The Franks were no better than their
neighbours--rather worse--so that it was nothing but their orthodoxy
which won for them the prize which the Lombard