The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

CHAPTER XIX

CONDITIONS AMONG THE PEOPLES WHO CONQUERED THE ROMAN EMPIRE—IRISH SACRIFICED FIRST BORN—THE WERGELD—THE SALIC LAW—CODE OF THE VISIGOTHS ON EXPOSED CHILDREN—THEODORIC AND CASSIODORUS.

WITH Church and State united in defence of the child’s right to live, we turn to the barbaric hordes that were then enfilading the Roman civilization. For the first time in the history of man the religious law was the same as the civil law, and for the first time in the history of man both represented human law.

With Diocletian’s division of the Empire into four almost equal parts under two Augusti and two Cæsars, there was frank acknowledgment that the great Roman Empire was at an end. With him, too, ended the fiction of a popular sovereignty. The Roman Emperor became an Eastern despot. He was no longer a man of the people easily to be seen and showing his democracy in frequent unofficial parade.

THE HOLY FAMILY
(AFTER RUBENS)
(REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK)

He was now a secluded person wearing the dress of the Orientals, surrounded by servile officials; and the Orientalism of the government went further when Constantine, at the farthest limit of Europe, built a new city, Constantinople, named after himself. Nominally it was but to divide with Rome the honours of being the capital; in reality it was to dim the even now fading lustre of the Seven Hills.

From the frontiers of China to the Baltic there came pressing down on the fast disintegrating Roman Empire armies of barbarians. Amid all the disorder, the calamities without number, when civilization, science, and the arts were all obscured, the Church gained strength, its tenets held sway, its humanities were accepted as the conquerors in their turn became the conquered. The Christian religion slowly gripped them all as out of the convulsions of government there was born the modern Europe.

To the Romans and their adopted allies it was a world of terror—to the Christians it was a friendly world, for the barbarians were known to the Church long before they were known to the soldiers who tried to repulse them.

It has been the fashion to decry the value of the check that the Church put on the barbarous tribes in the early part of the Christian era.[388] Up to the very door of the Church there was, it is true, slaughter—there it stopped. Had it not been for the Church upholding what it did of civilization and humanity, it is difficult to say what would have been the outcome of the hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gephids, Longobards, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons who, at one time or another, fell upon Rome.