From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic races there were to arise two types of civilization, utterly different in kind, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin. In one the prevailing element, after the fusing was complete, was to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. Herein lies the difference between these two great divisions of the human family, and this is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day between Spain and the United States. It is a difference created not by the mastery of arms, but by the more efficient mastery of ideas.
When the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, after a Roman occupation of over three hundred years, they swept it clean of Roman laws, literature, and civilization. Untamed pagan barbarians though they were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals of society and government, and they cast out the corrupt old empire, root and branch.
The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened than they, already Christianized, and, perhaps, even superior in intelligence, were content in the words of Ataulf—"to renew and maintain by Gothic strength the fame of Rome." So they built upon the ruins of decaying institutions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom which flourished with the enormous vitality drawn from the conquering race, which race was in turn conquered by Roman ideals.
So, in the conflict now existing between Spain and the United States, we see the Spaniard, the child of the Romans; valorous, picturesque, cruel, versed in strategic arts, and with a savor of archaic wickedness which belongs to a corrupt old age. In the American we see the child of the simple Angles and Saxons, no less brave, but just, and with an enthusiasm and confiding integrity which seems to endow him with an imperishable youth.
Footnote A:[ (return) ]
The famous Gothic code established by him still linger in much of Spanish jurisprudence.
CHAPTER VI.
The story of Ulfilas, who Christianized the pagan Goths in the last half of the fourth century, is really the first chapter not alone in the history of Gothic civilization but in that of the German and English literatures; which, with their vast riches, had their origin in the strange achievement of Ulfilas. He had, while a boy, been captured by some Goths off the coast of Asia Minor, and was called by them "Wulf-ilas" (little wolf). In his desire to translate the Bible to his captors Wulf-ilas reduced the Gothic language to writing. He had first to create an alphabet; taking twenty-two Roman letters, and inventing two more: the letter w, and still another for th. So while, after Constantine, the Christian religion was being adopted by the Roman Empire, and while its simple dogmas were being discussed and refined into a complicated and intricate system by men versed in Greek philosophy, and then formulated by minds trained in logic and rhetoric, the same religion was being spelled out in simple fashion by the Goths in central Europe from the book translated for them by Ulfilas.
All they found was that Jesus Christ was the beloved son of God and the Saviour of the world; that he was the long-promised Messiah, and to believe in him and to follow his teachings was salvation. They knew nothing of the Trinity nor of any theologic subtleties, and this was the simple faith which the Goths carried with them into the lands they conquered.
The Romans, who had spent three centuries in burning Christians and trying to obliterate the religion of Christ, were now its jealous guardians. They considered this "Arianism," as it was called, a blasphemous heresy, so shocking that they refused to call it Christianity at all. The history of the first century of the Gothic kingdom in Spain was therefore mainly that of the deadly strife between Arianism and Catholicism, or orthodoxy. The Goths could not discuss, for they were utterly unable to understand even the terms under discussion; but they could fight and lay down their lives for the faith which had done so much for them; and this they did freely and fiercely.