Roman Gelasius endeavours to awaken a kindred pride in the Emperor Anastasius, now the sole representative of Roman sovereignty; for Italy is under the dominion of the Goth. Gelasius might even seem to cherish some secret hope of the deliverance of Rome from its barbaric lord, by the intervention of the yet Roman East. But at the same time Gelasius asserts boldly, for the first time, in these strong and discriminating terms, the supremacy of the clergy in all religious matters. "There are two powers which rule the world, the Imperial and the Pontifical. You are the sovereign of the human race, but you bow your neck to those who preside over things divine." The priesthood is the greater of the two powers; it has to render an account in the last day for the acts of kings." Pope Anastasius II., the successor of Gelasius, spoke a milder, more conciliatory, even more suppliant language. He dared to doubt the damnation of a bishop excommunicated by the see of Rome:"Felix and Acacius are now both before a higher tribunal; leave them to that unerring judgment." He would have the name of Acacius passed over in silence, quietly dropped, rather than publicly expunged from the diptychs. This degenerate successor of St. Peter is not Pope Anastasius. Nov. 24, 496. y "Te sicut Romæ natus, Romanum Pass over eight or nine centuries, and principem, amo, colo, suscipio."-Ad hear Innocent IV.; we give the pregAnastas., A.D. 493. nant Latin: "Dominus enim Jehsus Christus. secundum ordinem Melchisedek, verus rex et verus sacerdos existens, quemadmodum patenter ostendit, nunc utendo pro hominibus honorificentiâ regiæ majestatis, nunc exequendo pro illis dignitatem pontificii apud Patrem, in apostolicâ sede non solum pontificatum, sed et regalem constituit monarchatum, beato Petro ejusque successoribus terreni simul et cœlestis imperii concessos habemus."-Apud Hoefler. Albert von Beham, p. 88. Stuttgard, 1847. u Gelasius refers to the authoritative example of Melchisedek, a type interpreted with curious variation during the Papal history. "In the oldest times Melchisedek was priest and king. The devil, in imitation of this holy example, induced the emperor to assume the supreme pontificate. But after Christianity had revealed the truth to the world, the union of the two powers ceased to be lawful. Neither did the emperor usurp the pontifical, nor the pontiff the imperial power. Christ, mindful of human frailty, has separated for ever the two offices, leaving the emperors dependent on the pontiffs for their everlasting salvation, the pontiffs dependent on the emperors for the administration of all temporal affairs. So the ministers of God do not entangle themselves in secular business; secular men do not intrude into things divine." Quando etiam pro ipsis regibus domino in divino reddituri sunt examine rationem."-Ad Anastas., Mansi, vii. 7 66 'Namque et predecessor noster Papa Felix, et etiam Acacius illic proculdubio sunt: ubi unusquisque sub tanto judice non potest perdere sui meriti qualitatem." -Anastas. Epist. A.D. 496. This letter was sent to Constantinople by two bi admitted to the rank of a saint. The Pontifical book (its authority on this point is indignantly repudiated) accuses Anastasius of having communicated with a deacon of Thessalonica, who had kept up communion with Acacius; and of having entertained secret designs of restoring the name of Acacius in the services of the Church. Nov. 19, 498. His death, according to Baronius, his sudden death by the manifest hand of God, destroyed altogether these hopes of peace. But how deep and lasting was the tradition of detestation against this meek renegade to papal authority, may be supposed by its survival for at least nine centuries. Dante beholds in hell the unhappy Anastasius, condemned for ever for his leniency to the heresy of Constantinople." Symmachus. On the death of Pope Anastasius, the contested election for the pontificate between Symmachus, a convert from paganism, and Laurentius, was exasperated by these divergences of opinion on the schism with the East. Festus, the legate of Anastasius, the deceased Pope, at Constantinople, the bearer, as it was supposed, of conciliatory terms obtained by the concessions of the Pope, on his return to Rome, threw himself as a violent partisan into the cause of Laurentius. The Emperor Anastasius himself, either in private letters to his adherents in Rome or in some public document, accused the successful Symmachus, who, by the decision of King Theodoric, had obtained the throne, as a Manichean; and as having audaciously conspired with the Senate of Rome (a singular Council for the Pope) to excommunicate the Emperor. The sovereign of the East inflexibly withheld the customary letters of gratulation on the accession of Symmachus. The apologetic invective of Symmachus to the Emperor is in the tone of shops, Cresconius of Todi and Germanus of Capua, with private instructions, not recorded in history. "Revocare Acacium"- so I translate the words-as Acacius had long been dead. Lib. Pontif., Vit. Anastas. a" E quivi per l' orribile soperchio Del puzzo, che 'l profondo abisso gitta Fotinus is said to have been the Deacon of Thessalonica. b"Catholica fides, quam in sede beati Petri, veniens ex paganitate, suscepi."Epist. ad Anastas. The date of this is uncertain. Was he a son or descendant of the famous Symmachus? The latter is more probable. * See on, under the reign of Theodoric, the elevation, struggle, and final establishment of Symmachus. fearless hostility. He retorts against the Eutychian the odious charge of Manicheism. He denies the excommunication of the Emperor Anastasius; Acacius only was excommunicated. Yet he leaves him to the inevitable conclusion that all who were in communion with the excommunicate must share their doom. Anastasius is arraigned as departing from his boasted neutrality only against the Catholics. The unyielding, almost turbulent resistance of the Roman party in Constantinople is justified by the aggressions assumed to be entirely on the part of the tyrannical Emperor. Peace between two such opponents was not likely to make much progress. Throughout the pontificate of Symmachus, the Roman faction in the East kept up that fierce and tumultuous, or more secret and brooding opposition, which lasted till the death of Anastasius. Symmachus may have heard the first tidings of the orthodox revolt of Vitalianus; his successor Hormisdas reaped the fruits of the humiliation of Anastasius, followed in due time by the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches. A.D. 498-514. d Between 499-512. Baronius places it 503. CHAPTER II. CONVERSION OF THE TEUTONIC RACES. CHRISTIANITY within the Roman Empire might seem endangered in its vital existence by these ungenial inward dissensions. Its lofty assertions that it came down from heaven as a religion of peace-of peace to the individual heart of man, as reconciling it with God, and instilling the serene hope of another life-of peace which should incorporate mankind in one harmonious brotherhood, the type and pre-establishment of the sorrowless and strifeless state of beatitude-might appear. utterly belied by the claims of conflicting doctrines, on the belief, all declared to be essential to salvation, and the animosities and bloody quarrels which desolated Christian cities. Anathema instead of benediction had almost become the general language of the Church. Religious wars, at least rare in the pagan state of society, seemed now a new and perpetual source of human misery-a cause and a sign of the weakness and decay, and so of the inevitable dissolution, of the Roman Empire. But Christianity had sunk into depths of the human heart, unmoved by these tumults, which so fiercely agitated the surface of the Christian world. Far below, less observed, less visible in its mode of operation, though manifest in its effects, was that profound conviction of the truth of the Gospel, that infelt sense of its blessings, which enabled it to pursue its course of conversion throughout the world, to bring the Roman mind more completely under subjection, and one by one to subdue the barbarian tribes which began to overspread and mingle with the Greek and Latin population of the Empire. For Christianity had that within it, which overawed, captivated, enthralled the innate or at least universal religiousness of mankind; that which was sufficiently simple to arrest by its grandeur the ruder bar barian, while, by its deeper mysteries, it led on the philosophic and reflective mind through unending regions of contemplation. It had its one Creator and Ruler of the universe, one God, one Redeemer, one Spirit, under which the ancient polytheism subsided into a subordinate hierarchy of intermediate beings, which kept the imagination in play, and left undisturbed almost all the hereditary superstitions of each race. It satisfied that yearning after the invisible, which seems inseparable from our nature, the fears and hopes which more or less vaguely have shadowed out some future being, the fears of retribution appeased by the promises of pardon, the hope of beatitude by its presentiments of peace. It had its exquisite goodness, which appealed to the indelible moral sense of mankind, to the best affections of his being; it had that equality as to religious privileges, duties, and advantages, to which it drew up all ranks and classes, and both sexes (slaves and females being alike with others under the divine care), and the abolition, so far, of the ordinary castes and divisions of men; with the substitution. of the one distinction, the clergy and the laity, and perhaps also that of the ordinary Christian and the monk, who aspired to what was asserted and believed to be a higher Christianity. All this was, in various degrees, at once the manifest sign of its divinity, and the secret of its gradual subjugation of nations at such different stages of civilisation. It prepared or found ready the belief in those miraculous powers, which it still constantly declared itself to possess; and made belief not merely prompt to accept, but creative of, wonder, and of perpetual preterhuman interference. Some special causes will appear, which seemed peculiarly to propitiate certain races towards Christianity, while their distinctive character reacted on their own Christianity, and through them perhaps on that of the world. We are not at present advanced beyond the period when Christianity was in general content (this indeed gave it full occupation) to await the settlement of the Northern tribes, if not within the pale, at least Empire. upon the frontiers of the Empire: it had not yet been emboldened to seek them out in their own native Conversion of Germans within the |