POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH 199
justify their claim to the double inheritance of the faith and of the power of Rome. There were two principal things which fitted them for their vocation. The Romans had been unable to be the instruments of the social action of Christianity on account of their moral depravity. It was precisely for those virtues in which they were most deficient that their barbarous enemies were distinguished. Salvianus expresses this in the following words (De Cubern. Dei, vii. 6): "Miramur si terrae . . . nostrorum omnium a Deo barbaris datae sunt, cum eas quae Romani polluerant fornicatione, nunc mundent barbari castitate?" 1 Whilst thus their habits met half-way the morality of the Christian system, their mythology, which was the very crown and summit of all pagan religions, predisposed them in 1ike manner for its adoption, by predicting its own end, and announcing the advent of a system which was to displace its gods. "It was more than a mere \vorldly impulse," says a famous northern divine, "that urged the northern nations to wander forth, and to seek, like birds of passage, a milder clime." We cannot, however, say more on the predisposition for Christianity of that race to whose hands its progress seems for ever committed, or on the wonder- ful facility with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism. 2 The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of civilisation ,vas in every way retarded, the virtues together with the ignorance of the barbarous S ta tee At a time when Arianism was extinct in the empire, it assumed among the Teutonic tribes the character of a national religion, and added a theoÍogical incitement to their animosity against the Romans. The Arian tribes,
1 II Do we wonder that God has granted all our lands to the barbarians, when they now purify by their chastity the places which the Romans had polluted with their debauchery? .. 2 Pope Anastasius writes to Clovis: .. Sedes Petri in tanta occasione non potest non laetari, cum plenitudinern gentium intuetur ad earn veloci gradu concurrere" (Bouquet, iv, 50),
