CHAPTER XVII THE END OF THE DARK AGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
APPENDIX I LIST OF EMPERORS AND POPES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
APPENDIX II A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
{1}
THE CHURCH AND THE BARBARIANS
CHAPTER I
THE CHURCH AND ITS PROSPECTS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: The task of the Church]
The year 461 saw the great organisation which had ruled and united Europe for so long trembling into decay. The history of the Empire in relation to Christianity is indeed a remarkable one. The imperial religion had been the necessary and deadly foe of the religion of Jesus Christ; it had fought and had been conquered. Gradually the Empire itself with all its institutions and laws had been transformed, at least outwardly, into a Christian power. Questions of Christian theology had become questions of imperial politics. A Roman of the second century would have wondered indeed at the transformation which had come over the world he knew: it seemed as if the kingdoms of the earth had become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. But also it seemed that the new wine had burst the old bottles. The boundaries of the Roman world had been outstepped: nations had come in from the East and from the West. The {2} system which had been supreme was not elastic: the new ideas, Christian and barbarian alike, pressed upon it till it gave way and collapsed. And so it came about that if Christianity had conquered the old world, it had still to conquer the new.