The Roman Empire And The Mission Of The Barbarians.

Third Article.

So the great Roman world sinned on to the last. Christianity, with a cry of fear and alarm, pointed to the stormful North, and exhorted to repentance; but her voice was drowned in the mad shouts of revelry and the wild din of reckless passion. The mistress of nations would not consent to show signs of fear or alarm. She cast her far-seeing eye over her wide, rich provinces towards the frowning horizon, and she had some knowledge of what sort of elements were hidden behind the black cloud-wall there. Never yet had the whole terrible ferocity of latent wrath burst forth; but still, from time to time, as she had watched for some centuries back, the storm-cloud had opened for a moment, and the low thunder-peal had been heard, and the lightning-fires had scathed her frontiers, and sometimes even had touched the very heart of some of her outlying provinces. But the fiery sword had been sheathed. The rent seemed to close again, and the thunder-murmurs died away. Still no brightness tinged the angry North. But darker, wilder, more fiercely threatening the storm-cloud grew. There was an angry God behind it, with his warrior hosts, hidden, and biding the solemn, predetermined moment. If the queen of empire felt, at times, a thrill of alarm, she tried to shake it off again. For proudly she gazed around on her widespreading dominions, and counted her almost countless monuments of conquest and glory, and appealed to the long past for her claim to live on immortally; and then took consolation and confidence to herself that the pillars of the firmament would crumble to dust, and the heavens fall, before she could be moved from her everlasting foundations. But still there were hearts that trembled for fear, conscious that something terrible was coming upon the world. The cry of the rapt seer of Patmos seemed still to be rising from the bosom of the Ægean Sea, and ringing in the ears of those who had faith in a God of justice. All those terrible woes foretold in the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of the Apocalypse seemed about to be accomplished. With strange wailing sound, as of a warning archangel's trumpet, the prophetic voice appeared to repeat: “Thou art just, O Lord, who art, and who wast, the holy one, because thou hast judged these things: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink.... And great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give her the cup of the wine of the indignation of his wrath.” Louder still that voice seemed to rise in tones of merciful warning: “Go out from her, my people; that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and the Lord hath remembered her iniquities.... She saith in her heart: I sit a queen, and am no widow; and sorrow I shall not see. Therefore shall her plagues [pg 846] come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall be burned with fire; because God is strong, who shall judge her.” So appeared to sound out clear the sad, wailing voice of the prophet in these sorrowful days. And the people of God took warning. Full of fear and dread, they fled from the “great Babylon” and the other principal cities of the empire, and hid themselves from the wrath that was to come. Those who remained behind laughed with mocking incredulity at their fears, and, as if in defiance of a mighty God, drained the sparkling goblet with an intenser relish, and the din of revelry waxed louder, and the Circensian games were applauded with a wilder joy. Countless numbers of Christians, who still had faith in God's Word and fear of his justice, hurried with rapid steps from these scenes of reckless dissipation and pleasure. They went to kneel with uplifted hands amid the sands of the Libyan Desert, or the wooded mountains of Lebanon; to implore mercy on a wicked world, amid the islets of the Tyrrhenian Sea, or in the rocky caves of the Thebaid.

At intervals another warning voice is heard, sounding, with the vehemence of the Baptist's cry, from the holy precincts of Bethlehem. S. Jerome is meditating and commenting, in his convent cell, on the prophecy of Ezekiel. As he ponders on the judgments of God on Jerusalem of old, he cannot but think of Rome in his own day. As the images of ruin and destruction grow before his mind, and his great heart burns with compassion for sinful, sinning man, he pauses in his reading, and lifts his voice in warning of the vials of wrath that are about to be poured out upon the empire. Through the voluptuous palaces of Rome which he once knew so well, the loud warning voice of the holy anchoret of Bethlehem pierces with an awakening sound, and helps to persuade many a patrician beauty “to exchange the dream of pleasure, so soon to be interrupted by the clangor of the Gothic trumpet, for the sacred vigils and austerities of the Holy Land.” “Read,” he cries out, “the Apocalypse of S. John: mark what is written of the woman clothed in scarlet, with the mystic inscription on her forehead, and seated upon seven hills, and of the destruction of Babylon. ‘Go out of her, my people,’ saith the Lord; ‘that you be not made partakers of her crimes, and partners in the plagues that shall afflict her.’ Leave the proud city to exult in everlasting uproar and dissipation, satiating her bloodthirstiness in the arena, and her insane passion in the circus. Leave it to her to trample under foot every sense of shame in her lascivious theatres.” After these words of startling vehemence, he attunes his voice to gentler accents. And pours out his enthusiastic soul in language of sweetest music, winning and captivating both ear and heart. He throws a ravishing fascination and sweetness around his life at Bethlehem that must have been irresistible to souls in which yet lingered any purity of sentiment or love for the holy and beautiful. “How different,” he exclaims, “the scenes that invite you hither! The most rustic simplicity is characteristic of the natal village of our Redeemer, and sacred hymns and psalmody are the only interruptions of the heavenly stillness and serenity which reign on every side. Walk forth into the fields: you startle with mingled astonishment and delight to find that ‘Alleluia’ is the burden of the ploughman's song; that it is with some inspired canticle the reaper recreates himself, in reposing [pg 847] at noontide from his overpowering toil; and that it is the royal Psalmist's inspiration that attunes the voice of the vine-dresser, as, scroll in hand, he plies his task all day.” Thus does he paint in charming colors the immediate neighborhood in which he lived so happily. His words take us back to the days of Eden, and make us realize what unfallen and sinless mankind would have been. Then he passes on to those scenes and names which are interwoven into the history of our Lord's life, and round these again he casts the fascination of his poetical outpourings. We are carried on as by a magic spell, and we feel ourselves drawn captives after the mighty heart that glows with such a fiery heat of love in that grotto of Bethlehem. We cannot wonder that many souls felt the wondrous spell of that clear, sweet voice, as it broke with its music-tones of penetrating power into the palaces of Rome. The loud-wailing trumpet-tones of the Apocalyptic seer, as they rose with terrific warning from the bosom of the Ægean, and the melodious music of the anchoret of Bethlehem, as it was carried westward on the breeze, both conveyed a message from a merciful God to the children whom he yet loved. But we will listen again to that winning voice from Bethlehem, as it pleads on, trying to draw Christians from the perils that were so near: “Oh! when shall that blessed day arrive,” it continues, “when it shall be our own delight to conduct you to the cave of the Nativity; together to mingle our tears with those of Mary and of the Virgin Mother in the sepulchre of our Lord; to press the wood on which he redeemed us to our throbbing lips; and, in ardent desire, to ascend with him from Mount Olivet?” We will hasten thence to Bethany to see Lazarus come forth in his winding-sheet, and to the banks of that blessed stream sanctified by the baptism of the Word made flesh. Thence to the huts of the shepherds who heard the canticle of “Glory to God on high” and “Tidings of great joy,” as they were keeping their night-watch over their flocks. We will pray at the tomb of David, and meditate under the steep precipice where inspiration used to come on the prophet Amos, until we hear again the living clangor of his shepherd-horn. In Mambre, we shall commune in spirit with the great patriarchs and their consorts who were buried there; visit the fountain where the eunuch was baptized by Philip; and in Samaria honor the relics of S. John the Baptist, of Abdias and Eliseus, and devoutly explore the caverns where the choirs of the prophets were miraculously fed, in the days of famine and persecution. We will extend our pilgrimage to Nazareth, and, as the name implies, behold the flower of Galilee. Hard by is Cana, where he changed water into wine. Thence to Mount Tabor, where our prayer shall be that our rest may not be with Moses and Elias, but in the eternal tabernacle, where we shall enjoy the beatific vision of the Father and the Holy Ghost. Thence returning, we shall see the Lake Genesareth, and the wilderness where the merciful Jesus feasted the multitudes; and Naim shall not be passed by unheeded, where he gave back to the disconsolate mother “her only son.” Hermon shall be pointed out, and the torrent of Endor where Sisera was overcome; and Capharnaum, the theatre of so many miracles. Thence going up to Jerusalem, as it were in the retinue of our Lord, as the disciples were wont to do, we will pass through Silo and Bethel; and having made the circuit of so many scenes, consecrated [pg 848] by the presence, the preaching, and the miracles of the Son of God, to that grotto where he was born to us a Saviour, we shall at last return; perpetually to hymn his praises, to deplore our trespasses with frequent tears; to give our days and nights to holy orisons, as if smitten with the same love which exclaimed, “Him whom my soul hath yearned for, have I found. I will hold him, and will not let him go.”[278] Such wondrous music did the spiritual enchanter pour forth from his lonely grotto. In such words as these, throbbing with love and holy zeal, did the great heart of the worn ascetic of Bethlehem gush forth. And they depicted in such vivid colors the sweet peace and purity and happiness of a new earthly paradise far away in the Eastern land, that many souls were lured away by the charmer's voice out of the great Western Babylon in time to escape the tempest that was just about to descend upon it. Many illustrious names appear among the fugitives. Paula forgot her lofty pedigree and her more than princely fortune, and fled eastward, and S. Melania and many others of patrician rank hurried away to Bethlehem to escape the impending doom. And there, whilst the mighty God thundered, and hurled his flaming arrows of vengeance, and the great sinful empire tottered and crashed under the awful blows of his wrath, did those favored Christians tremble and pray amid holy scenes and sweet associations, round the grand spiritual figure of S. Jerome.

But it was not only among the believers in God's Word, and those who observed the signs of the times from their watch-towers in the heart of the empire, that the belief in the imminent catastrophe had taken a strong hold. The idea that vengeance was close at hand was agitating with fierce intensity the barbaric nations themselves. Whence that idea came, they themselves could not have told. It had long been working in their minds like a living fire; it had gone on inflaming their souls till they felt their whole being on fire with an ungovernable passion for destruction and vengeance. They had been kept for long centuries by an overruling power in their northern forests, waiting for an unknown moment in the future. But that moment, they felt, was now at hand. They were ready for it, for they knew they were the scourges of wrath in the hands of a mighty God.

But before that fierce, black storm-cloud up yonder in the North pours out its fiery wrath upon the doomed empire, we will try to get a glimpse behind it to see what elements are hidden there.

Let the reader open his historical atlas, and follow with his eye the boundaries of the Roman Empire in the West. He will see that the east, west, and south of Europe are lying at the feet of Rome, the heart and centre of the world. As he casts his glance over his chart, he will be struck by the countless names that cover the face of Italy and Gaul and Spain, and all those countries that are comprehended within the rule and civilization of the great capital of the empire. But as he raises his eye northwards, he marks the outlines of Roman power. He might say that the Rhine and the Danube are the boundaries in that direction of imperial dominion. And what does he see beyond? Nothing that denotes that civilization has ever set a firm foot there. The great Hercynian forest begins at the Rhine, and stretches far away, with its dense, impenetrable blackness, as far as the [pg 849] Vistula. It looks like a long, broad line of fortification thrown up by nature to guard the North from Roman ambition. Beyond this, again, is a wild unknown land. The student becomes bewildered as he tries to gain an accurate knowledge of it. It is a dreary wilderness of forest, and swamp, and vast tracts of land that have known no tillage. He finds no name of city or town, but only the hard names of countless barbaric tribes. These seem to fill, without order or defined limit of dominion, the vast area from the borders of the Rhine and Danube to the Baltic Sea, and the mainland and innumerable islets of Scandinavia. If he cast his eye towards the North-east, the prospect is of a land still less known, and, at the same time, less thickly peopled. But the barbaric names are there, though few in number, and the wild waste seems to stretch away interminably into the darkness. The map calls it Scythia, and that is almost all the student can gather from looking at it; but it seems to him that it is the high-road by which the countless barbarian tribes have come into Europe. We may well believe Gibbon when he tells us that this vast, unknown northern land, cut off from the Roman Empire by the Rhine and the Danube, and shrouded in gloom and darkness by its widespreading forests, extended itself over a third part of Europe.[279] Tacitus describes it as a country under a gloomy sky, rude, dismal in aspect and cultivation; more humid than Gaul, more stormy than Noricum and Pannonia.[280] It was a country where the waters were often covered with thick ice, and the mountains with snow, where the air was cold and sharp, and the storms blew fierce and strong. It was, in a word, a country where no delicate, soft races could have lived, but where only men of stalwart frame and hardy natures could have their home; men who could bound up the snowy mountain heights with a feeling of luxury, could hunt with delight among the frozen swamps, and run in the teeth of the sharp blast through thick forests where the warm sun-rays never penetrated. And what was this strange, unknown land, so dark and impenetrable, so vast in its extent, so defended by rivers and ocean and far-reaching fortification of Hercynian forest, so wild and uncultivated, so dismal and cold, and overhanging with its savage, frowning aspect the empire of Rome? It was the camp of the God of battles. With a divine purpose of his own, he had kept it free from Roman conquest. He had marked it off for himself by those wide rivers and stormy seas, and planted that thick long line of forest trees on its frontier, and shrouded its vast area in secrecy and mystery by widespreading woods. And under the shadow of these thick forests he had, for long generations, been gathering his warrior-bands. The great empire had been growing for centuries in power and riches, and had piled up her monuments to tell the ages of her glories, and had come to think herself everlasting; but whilst she thus developed her power so mightily, her destroyers were being gathered together in secret in that Northern land. It was not by chance that the Roman Empire had built herself up in such glory and imposing magnitude on the ruins of the great empires that had preceded her, and not for a barren purpose. God had marked with his finger the boundary-line of her dominions long before she extended her power so far, and [pg 850] he had appointed her the work which she was to do for him. But he had marked out, also, the term in the future whereunto she should endure, and had chosen beforehand the instruments which he would use for her destruction. As she was to be the most mighty of all empires which the world had ever seen, so would her destroyers have to be mighty and terrible in their powers of destruction. And those destroyers God will have ready at the right moment. No human eye could see what was going on under that dense darkness in the North; its mysterious depth was impenetrable to mortal kin. It was the secret laboratory of God, where he was fashioning his instruments of wrath. He had long been there amidst the terror and gloom beckoning the wild races of the earth to come to him, and they had obeyed his call, though they knew not why. Far back in the ages of time, before history had taken up her pen, there was a great breaking up of the Aryan family in the Eastern land, and they divided themselves into two great sections. They moved in opposite directions, one towards the East, the other towards the West. Though that breaking up seems, at first sight, to have nothing providential about it, yet it was no accidental separation. Bringing our Catholic principles to bear upon it, we soon see that it was the work of God. The wild tribes wandered on, they knew not whither. But they had a guide as real and definite as the Israelites in after-times. It was, perhaps, no pillar of fire nor mysterious moving cloud, but yet as unerring in its leading. The Eastern Aryans took possession of Persia, and, invading India, gradually made themselves masters of the country as far as the Ganges. In this rich and fertile region they soon advanced, with rapid steps, to a high state of civilization. When we first meet them in history, they are a powerful nation, with well-disciplined armies, and arts and sciences highly cultivated. Of those who took the westerly course, some settled down in the southern parts of Europe, and at the opening of history are found in a state of civilization. One section of them, wild, bold, and free, remain in a nomadic state. They wander on towards the Northwest, never settling down, ever restless. They feel themselves drawn ever onward, as by some mysterious power which they cannot resist. That strange, unseen power is he who dwells amid the darkness of the Scandinavian and Suabian forests. And as they pour into that weird gloom, band after band, they are lost to view. God wants them there for a time. They are one day to rush forth again, at his bidding, wild and fierce as ever, to do their appointed work.

Of these multitudinous tribes, hidden under the dark covering of those Northern forests, we cannot undertake to give any detailed account. The student who has ever pored over his historical chart representing the home of the barbarians, knows well how impossible it is to obtain accurate ideas about them. He is simply bewildered with the number of tribes, and the hard names by which they are designated. He is content to let Dr. Latham and Mr. Kingsley dispute at their pleasure as to whether the Goths were Teutons or a separate tribe. Some authors, with Gibbon, would make the Teutons the great tribe which included and absorbed almost all the rest, whilst Dr. Latham insists that they were far less in numbers than is commonly supposed. It is not now our purpose to enter on a question of this nature. Our view of them is [pg 851] simply as a fourmillement des nations, confused, indistinguishable, undefinable. We cannot pretend to speak with accuracy as to what territory was occupied by each tribe. What they do we can only guess at. They do not regard themselves as in their settled home. They wander about restless, and unsatisfied in their wild forest lands. They have only an indistinct idea whence they came, but they have a mysterious instinct whither they are to go when the appointed day comes. At one time they are on the Baltic shore, at another on the Danube bank. They never think of marching back Eastward, whence they came; their faces are turned towards the South, and they dream of a rich, golden city in which they are one day to revel and feast to their heart's content.

It is something bewildering to pause over and think upon, in our historical studies, is this Northern land of darkness, with its hidden millions of wild savages silently wandering about in their gloomy forest, under the eye of God, and waiting for the signal to rush forth upon the sin-laden empire of Rome! There never was anything more mysterious in history. They hang for long years, like a suspended curse, over a sinful world. They would have come down thundering like a crushing avalanche long before they did, if God had not held them back. It is wonderful to think how really they were in the hand of the great Over-ruler. Suddenly it had entered into their minds, as we have seen, to break up their home in the far East, in prehistoric times, and they had obeyed the instinct. They moved away from their native land, and set out upon their wanderings. They knew no land beyond their own, nor had they reason to expect that they would discover anything better than what they enjoyed in the country of their birth. But still they wandered on. Whither they were journeying they had no knowledge, but they were obeying an overmastering power. They found themselves, at last, gathered together in a mysterious land of darkness, and there they paused. They felt they were at the rendezvous to which they had been called. They were at the feet of him who had beckoned to them to leave their homes in the Eastern land. Their instinct now was to remain hidden there for a time behind the great fortification of the Hercynian forest. From beginning to end all through their history these barbarians are in the hand of God, under his generalship, and used to execute his designs. Such teaching as this will, no doubt, appear puerile to the sneering atheism of men like Herbert Spencer. He and those of his school have discovered that God has nothing to do with the course of human events or the government of the universe.[281] Social Science has led them far beyond the old-world ideas of God and divine government; but, thanks to the sound and safe teaching of Catholic principles, there are yet men in these days who refuse to run after the ignis fatuus of Spencerian philosophy.

But when we consider how the great civilized world of the Roman Empire and this world of the barbarian tribes bordered so close on one another for so long a time, and when we think what conquests Christianity had made wherever civilization had set its foot, we wonder how that dark Northern land could remain still heathen. Were not the citadels of the Christian religion planted all along the borders of the Roman Empire? Did no gleams, then, of Christian [pg 852] light shoot forth into the darkness beyond? We know that such certainly was the case in the Northwestern portion, where the Goths dwelt, for we read of Ulphilas and his apostolic labors among that tribe. But for the most part, the darkness was unpenetrated, and we are struck by the sight of two worlds running so close up to one another and yet remaining so isolated in a religious point of view. The fact was, the time for the conversion of the Northmen had not yet come. Their apostles were to be a race of heroes born on the mountain-heights, and nourished in the pure, bracing air of monastic solitude. The barbarians were waiting for the monks. It is true that these wild tribes had already a worship of their own, and deeply religious in their way they certainly were. It was a religion quite in keeping with their wild, free character. Men who were so restless and active in their disposition, who delighted in storm and mountain and roaring torrents, would have no temple of wood or stone for their place of worship. Their temple was out in the open air, under the driving clouds, within hearing of the tumbling waterfalls, in sight of nature's face; for nature to them was God. They saw him in the great mountain towering up on high, in the rocking forest-trees, in the wide-stretching plain, in the flowing river, in the gushing fountain. He was in every object around them; in every speck of light in the overarching heavens; in the glistening streamlet; in the variegated flowers bedecking nature's face; in the rock that stood out to break the power of the rushing sea-waves; in the very stones scattered around them on the plain. There was a divinity of some kind in everything they saw.[282] It would, perhaps, be more true to say that their religion was polytheism rather than pantheism. We find, moreover, that the tendency of their religious belief was to keep alive in their souls the warlike spirit. The greatest and highest of their gods were beings of mighty power and terrible violence. “Woden, or Odin, as he was called in Scandinavia, was the omnipresent, the almighty creator, the father of gods and men; who ruled the universe, riding on the clouds, and sending rain and sunshine; in whom were centred all godlike attributes, of which he imparted a share to the other gods; and from whom proceeded all beauty, wisdom, strength, and fruitfulness, the knowledge of agriculture and the arts, the inspirations of music and song, and all good gifts. He was the giant hunter, who in the darkest nights rushed through the air on his white charger, clad in a brown mantle, his white locks streaming from beneath his slouching hat, followed by a train of wild huntsmen, the horses snorting fire, the bloodhounds baying, announcing war and carnage, danger and distress, as he passed along with lightning speed. But he was in a more special way the god of war, revelling in blood and slaughter, giving courage and victory to his votaries, and admitting to his Valhalla, or hall of bliss, none but those who died by the sword.