From the outset the Christian Church was imbued with a most intense and burning general missionary zeal. The command came in very distinct terms from the Master himself.[229:1] But there was no recognised principle of propagandism and no special organisations to carry on the work. Each Christian felt the individual obligation to win his fellows to the new faith. Separate churches no doubt naturally felt the necessity of some corporate action to convert the heathen in the neighbourhood. Prayers, indeed, for the conversion of the heathen were early made an integral part of the liturgies of the Church, East and West.[229:2] The actual diffusion of Christianity, however, proceeded in a special sense from the evangelical labours of the individual bishops[229:3]
and the clergy. In fact missionary work was regarded as one of their specific duties handed down from the Apostles. With the development of the organisation of the Church and the appearance of patriarchs arose the thought that it was the duty of these powerful centres to carry on missionary activity in foreign fields. Monasticism was early utilised for this important work. It must never be forgotten that the aggressive evangelising efforts of the early Church were mainly those of the West, and here is seen another powerful factor in the rise of the mediæval Church.
The conception early developed in the Church that the spread of God's Kingdom on earth was a warfare. That idea was founded on the words of Jesus,[230:1] on the assertions of the Apostles, and on the sacrifices of the early martyrs. Monasticism made this conviction peculiarly personal. The organised Church asserted it on every occasion. The conversion of the barbarians was viewed, in a broad sense, as an invasion and a conquest. It was a campaign with all western Europe as its field. In time it covered six centuries or more. The generals, the able strategists, were the competent and zealous Roman pontiffs, and the subordinate officers were emperors, kings, princes, bishops, and abbots. The army was that great host of devoted monks, of consecrated priests, and earnest Christian laymen. The weapons in the hands of these conquerors were Christian love and sympathy. They were driven on by an irresistible zeal for saving souls. They were clothed in the power of poverty, austerity, suffering, obedience, and self-denial. The conflict was one which, in its outcome, was to shape the destiny of the world.
The man above all others who was carried away
by this dream of duty for the Church militant in winning those outside the true Church to membership, was the monk-Pope, Gregory the Great. Pagan Rome had failed to make a complete and permanent conquest of the barbarians. Christian Rome, inspired by this master spirit, was to succeed in conquering both the bodies and the souls of the barbarians, and to use them for her own glory.
When Gregory the Great died in 604, Christendom practically covered the Roman Empire and at certain points extended beyond it. Those who bore the name Christian included Jews, Romans, Greeks, Celts, and Germans. The Christian world was already divided into two great branches—the Eastern, or Greek Church, and the Western, or Roman Church,—which were becoming more and more pronounced in their differences.
The Christian missionary work, from the sixth to the twelfth century, must be viewed broadly as a process of civilisation, since the missionaries carried with them intellectual light, as well as spiritual truth, and paved the way for law and justice. They opened up channels through which the higher ideals and better institutions of the south might work northward to revolutionise agriculture, trade, social life, and general economic conditions. "The experience of all ages," said Neander, "teaches us that Christianity has only made a firm and living progress, where from the first it has brought with it the seeds of all human culture, although they have only been developed by degrees."[231:1]
Mediæval conversion to Christianity was, as a rule, tribal, or national, rather than individual, or personal, and consequently it took some time before satisfactory
fruitage was noticeable in the lives of the people. But it was a great victory to substitute the Christian for the pagan ideal. The agencies employed to carry out this process of conversion were: (1) missionaries, mostly Latin, Celtic, English, German, Greek, and Slavic monks; (2) the sword in the hands of a stern ruler; (3) the marriage of Christian women to pagan kings and princes; and (4) the recognised superiority of Christianity, Christian institutions, and Christian nations. It must be borne in mind, likewise, that some of the German tribes settled in the very heart of Christendom where Christian influences could operate directly and immediately.
The earliest successful conversion of the Teutons was to Arianism. That work was begun at least as early as the time of Constantine, because a Gothic bishop sat in the Council of Nicæa (325). Bishop Ulfilas (d. 381), the "Apostle to the Goths," called by Constantine the Great "the Moses of the Goths,"[232:1] translated the Bible into Gothic[232:2] and won his countrymen to Arianism. St. Chrysostom in 404 established in Constantinople a school for the training of Gothic missionaries.[232:3] The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, and Vandals all embraced that faith. But the fervent and more aggressive missionary zeal of Rome gradually replaced Arianism in western Europe with orthodox Christianity—the Burgundians in 517, the Suevi in 550, the