quickly, and developed much native talent. The accommodating religion of Rome received the Supreme Being of the Druids, and the inferior deities which had been shaped by the ignorance of the people into its Pantheon, and the contact of that loose foreign mythology corrupted the old creed. In the reign of Claudius, probably on some political pretext, the Druids were expelled from Gaul. A few teachers from the Church of Smyrna brought Christianity to Lyons about the year 160, and the records still preserve the names of fifty of the early proselytes. They were soon compelled to testify their faith in the midst of a fierce persecution. Let the historian relate the touching fate of Blandina, one of the earliest victims:

Another victim, whose appearance on the scene was more characteristic of the great social revolution Christianity was affecting, was Blandina-a woman and a slave. Through all the excruciating agonies of the torture, her mistress, who was herself a confessor, watched her in trembling anxiety lest she should be betrayed into some weak concession. But Christianity possessed a living power then which could lift even the lowly slave into a sublimity of heroism. From the cross where, like her heavenly Master, she hung, in the gaze of a frantic rabble, she sang hymns to his praise; when taken down from it, the beasts of the arena refused to do their office, as if their brute natures, softer than those of men, could be awed by such sweet piety; and the intervals between her punishments, twice postponed, she passed in comforting those of her companions who were reserved for a similar fate. The apostates, whom weakness had allowed to retract, were animated by her to a renewed strength, and they counted it their highest joy to be admitted to the prospect of sharing in her sufferings. At last, when she was dragged forth to final execution, on the recurrence of the great festival games which Caligula had instituted on the banks of the Rhone, she met her death, by the horns and feet of a furious wild animal, "like one invited to a wedding banquet." She was the last to die, but her name became the first in the roll of those saints whom the pious gratitude of the Gallic Church has since raised to the skies.-P. 133.

In spite of persecution Christianity spread rapidly, or, we might be justified in saying, by the help of persecution. For it cannot be doubted that in the trying times of the Church, its loftiest virtues have shone most brightly, and have compelled not only the respect, but the conversion of its enemies. If many weak believers abjured their faith or obtained tolerance by bribes, still the greater portion stood firmly by the religion

which had led them from darkness to light, and which was now, through temporal torture and shame, to conduct them to the mansions prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Their constant fervor, meekness, and fortitude, their gentleness and charity even to their persecutors, could not but cause solemn inquiry in the souls of those around them as to what mysterious influence could produce such qualities and sustain them in such awful calamities. History records that such inquiry was occasioned, and that. the true faith multiplied faster than the ashes of the martyrs could be born upon the wind.

But the Church had its own internal difficulties and corruptions to undergo. Innumerable heresies, the misshapen fruit of Oriental and Grecian speculations, were grafted like ugly excrescences upon the simple and practical teachings of Christ. The great tendency of the age became a forgetfulness that the object of the Gospel was to implant in the soul that love to God and man which should work inwardly to purify the heart, and outwardly to virtuous life and active beneficence, and that the bliss of a future existence is but the carrying out and completion of the principles which were operative here. But at this period many minds began to see in the Gospel plan nothing but a tool, which by studious working might open the door of heaven, but was in no way useful below. "Its spiritual graces and manly virtues were more and more confounded with inward ecstasies or external observances." Immolation of the body, denial of the holiest social affections, abnegation of all family and social ties, would assist, it was earnestly believed, in attaining that divorce from earthly things which was, by a mistaken understanding of the divine teachings, deemed necessary to fit the devotee for heavenly things. Mingled with these ideas were notions derived from "the Gnostic and Manichean heresies themselves," says Mr. Godwin, "derived from earlier Indian rigors," which "gradually fermented into a dark humor for renouncing the commerce of mankind."

The contemplative life came to be regarded as the only one consistent with entire purity. Splendid examples, as they were deemed, of pious hardihood, like those of the hermits Paul and Anthony, reproached the consciences and dazzled the fancies of the susceptible multitude. Emulous crowds broke in upon the scenes of their lonely and heroic triumphs. The caves and the deserts, the savage

wood and the desolate mountain, swarmed with anchorets who abandoned the life of the world to enjoy in solitude and silence the higher life of the soul, a nearer vision of God. Sincere religious aspirations, or the consciousness of a guilt which could only be atoned by the severest self-punishments, were the motives of some; repugnance to the prevalent depravity, or weariness of the vicissitudes, of the persecutions, and of the agitations of a troubled existence, were the motives of others; but the many were carried away by that contagious sympathy which sometimes seizes whole generations, we know not how. Individuals of every class, rich and poor, male and female, the polished and the ignorant, fled their families, their estates, their friends, the offices, the amenities and the amusements of social intercourse, to engage in the laborious spiritual exercises and the gloomy physical austerities of the wilderness. Their food, herbs, their drink, water, their bed a mat of palms or the naked rock, they passed the days and the nights in alternations of angelic ecstasy or diabolic despair, struggling to extinguish the lusts of the flesh, even the desires of the mind, and to exorcise the myriads of enticing or pestering demons with which their sultry fancies peopled the desolation.

The fertile and imaginative East, which had long been the cradle of every contemplative extravagance, saw the first fervors of this acrid and barren devotion. But from the spawning caves of the Thebaid, the wild rocks of Nitria, and the burning Syrian sands, it soon spread to the secluded islands of the Mediterranean, to the volcanic clefts of Italy, and to the frowning forests and shadowy mountain ranges of Gaul. A jealous demur on the part of a few of the clergy, and the undisguised hostility of the Roman rabble, could not arrest an enthusiasm inflamed by the ardent plaudits of Athanasius, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and propagated by the still more ardent zeal of St. Martin. The monastery which he founded at Ligugè led the way to many other foundations, to that of St. Faustin at Nîmes, of St. Castor at Apt, of St. Victor at Marseilles, and of St. Honoratus at Lerins, one of the isles of Hyères, the most celebrated of the age. But the monasticism of the West was of a different character from that of the East. The colder climate and colder temperament of men, an organizing and practical rather than a fervid or contemplative genius, tempered the spirit of asceticism by more active and social impulses. The cœnobitic form of monkery prevailed over the eremitic, although the deeds of Simeon Stylite did not want for an imitator even in Gaul. Communities for labor, and prayer, and study, took the place of the darksome cave and the moaning woods. A corporate zeal begat the ambition for proselytizing, and, instead of lacerations and tears, or, rather, in spite of lacerations and tears, the monks emerged from their cells, they scoured the fields, they penetrated the cities, they dragged down the statues and temples of idolatry, they scattered the consternated worshipers of the ancient faith, and they participated in the mobs which often determined the quarrels of the prelates or the excellences of doctrine.-Pp. 207-209.

Passing from this singular phase of man's religious growth, we must glance at one other change which our author treats with his accustomed directness and force, the social and moral decay which was hastening the fall of the empire. We cannot do better than to give his masterly résumé of the elements of the declino:

As a mere economy, the ancient order was bankrupt and exhausted; the corrosions of slavery, which, under the republic, had eaten away the vigor of Italy, abandoning three hundred thousand acres in the heart of the most fertile region of the globe to barrenness and disease, had been carried by the empire into all the provinces. Smitting with a fatal paralysis nearly every industrial force; gluing the once free laborer to the soil under the name of colon, till he became as abject and wretched as the slave; dispersing the small proprietors among the barbarians, or driving them to an enforced dependence upon patrons whose enormous estates were expanded into more monstrous proportions by these incessant gains, slavery had undermined, drained, dislocated, and demoralized the material resources and functions of society. And it was this utter ruin of its material means which rendered the demands of the fise so cruel and persecuting. The dark picture which we have seen Lactantius paint, of the extortions of the treasury in the time of Diocletian, might have been deepened in the time of Constantine and his successors. Nothing, indeed, in human records suggests a more painful image to the mind than those pages of the codes of Theodosius and Justinian which show us the later emperors in their vain and desperates plunges to suppress, to mollify, or to escape the evils of an utter decay of vital and productive force. Society writhes and groans visibly before us like a man in the agonies of the rack. The labors of authority turn with frantic violence upon every possible process of extorting the means of a pompous subsistence from withered husks and thrice-rinsed rags. Laws are heaped upon laws, till the blasting decrees of despotism have operated like a fatal spell. Men of all ranks and conditions are fastened to their vocations, to their miscalled privileges, even, as bears to a stake, to be baited. The senatorials and clarissimi are bound to their properties, lest they should run away from the charges with which they are encumbered; the curial, who is responsible for the collection of the municipal taxes, cannot abandon his office except at the risk of outlawry and ruin; the young conscript is branded, that he may be reclaimed if he deserts his post; a universal system of forced labor supplies the public transportations; trade is smothered in vast corporations, that are swathed and strangled by restraints, and the whole industrial economy inclines rapidly to an Indian fixity of caste and a Chinese stagnation of routine.Pp. 165, 166.

The third period includes the German inroads and the reign of the Merovingan kings. We will not pause upon the interesting account of the religion and laws of the Germans, which have been so fully elucidated by late writers, nor upon the fruitless struggles of the dying empire against the wild Goths, Huns, and Franks, which remind one of an old buffalo surrounded by prairie wolves. The battle of Châlons is so vividly described that we cannot pass over it, especially as it occupies so important a place in the history of civilization:

In the winter of the year 450 he began to move forward, with a force of five hundred thousand men, from his wild Danubian fastnesses to the banks of the Rhine. By the beginning of March, in the following year, he had reached the fords of that separating stream. His motley throng, embracing representatives of nearly every race in Europe-the black Kazar, the tattooed Gelon, the stalwart Rugian, the Herul, crazy with valor, and the Bellonote and the Neuri, who have left their names alone to history-had gathered other varieties of savagery upon its passage. The Quad and the Marcoman of the Carpathian Hills mingled with the Suab of the Black forest and the outcast Frank of the northern dunes. All the wild valor that for five hundred years had threatened civilization seemed to be confounded in one impulsive mass. Amid the rolling boulders of the ice, and upon the trunks of trees torn from the Hercynian woods, they crossed the river near the confluence of the Moselle. Attila, installing himself for a moment in the ancient capital of Trèves, summoned Gaul to surrender in the magniloquent tones of an Oriental sovereign. The debilitated Roman garrisons fled even before he had advanced; the federate barbarians, half sympathizing in his career, offered but an ineffectual resistance; while the poor provincials, disarmed by Roman policy, disgusted by Roman oppression, debased by Roman vices, stood in doubt whether he might the more properly be regarded as an enemy or a deliverer. But the smoke of a hundred burning villages, the ruins of the fairest cities-Augst, Strasburg, Mentz, Metz, Worms, Tongres, Arras-speedily convinced them that the stranger was, indeed, a foe. The consternated multitudes fled to the fortresses of the towns, to the caves of the mountains, to the waves of the sea. Alone the heroic and pious bishops of the Church rose superior to the paralyzing terrors of the panic. Arrayed in their magnificent robes, and chanting their solemn and imposing psalms, they would often place themselves at the head of their timorous flocks, and, with prayers and threatenings, arrest, if not roll back, the irresistible human tide.-Pp. 255, 256. The last division is entitled German Gaul, and recounts the deeds of the Mayors of the Palace and the career of Charle

magne.

A race of giants they were indeed, to whom the