The History of Christianity - John S. C. Abbott (bookstand for reading .txt) 📗

far better than anarchy, had now become but a crumbling ruin, which no human energy or skill could rebuild. The attempt by Julian the Apostate to reinstate paganism had proved so utter and humiliating a failure, that there was no possibility of the undertaking being ever again repeated.

There can be but one religion which an enlightened world will accept; and that is Christianity. If Christianity is renounced, the world will never adopt any substitute which has yet been proposed. The superstitions of barbarians are all too senseless to be thought of for a moment. Though there was a political party in the Roman empire who rallied around Julian, even many of his partisans regarded his efforts to reinstate paganism with ridicule and contempt. The wits of the day lampooned him mercilessly.

Honorius, Emperor of the West, after a disastrous reign of twenty-eight years, died in the year 423. Weary scenes of anarchy and bloodshed ensued, which we have no space to describe. Placidia, a Christian princess, daughter of the great Theodosius, had been carried away captive by the Goths. The splendor of her birth, her marvellous personal beauty, and the elegance of her manners, won universal admiration. The young Gothic king Adolphus, who was a man of unusual grace both of person and mind, won the hand and heart of his captive. The nuptials were attended with great splendor at Narbonne, as we have mentioned in the previous chapter.

“The bride,” writes Gibbon, “attired and adorned like a Roman empress, was placed on a throne of state; and the king of the Goths, who assumed on this occasion the Roman habit, contented himself with a less honorable seat by her side. The nuptial gift, which, according to the custom of his nation, was offered to Placidia, consisted of the rare and magnificent spoils of her country. The barbarians enjoyed the insolence of their triumph; and the provincials rejoiced in this alliance, which tempered by the mild influence of love and reason the fierce spirit of their Gothic lord.”194

The love of Adolphus for his beautiful bride was not abated by time or possession. A year passed, when they rejoiced in the birth of a son, whom they named Theodosius, after his illustrious grandfather. The death of this child in his infancy caused great grief to his parents. He was buried in a silver coffin in one of the churches near Barcelona. Soon after this, Adolphus was assassinated in his palace, at Barcelona, by one of his followers,—Sarus. Singeric, the brother of Sarus, seized the Gothic throne. He immediately murdered the six children of Adolphus, the issue of a former marriage. Placidia was treated with the most cruel and wanton insult. The daughter of the renowned Emperor Theodosius was driven on foot, amidst a crowd of vulgar captives, twelve miles, before the horse of a barbarian who had murdered her husband.

Singeric enjoyed his elevation but seven days, when assassination terminated his earthly being. Wallia, who by the suffrages of the Goths succeeded to the throne, restored Placidia to her brother Honorius. The reign of the barbarians in Gaul, with their wars and their plunderings, caused for a time the ruin of those once opulent provinces.

Attila the Hun, to whom we have alluded, with an innumerable horde of the ferocious warriors, invaded Italy, everywhere perpetrating atrocious acts of cruelty. The barbarians massacred their prisoners, inflicting upon them inhuman tortures, apparently from the mere love of cruelty. Two hundred beautiful young maidens were exposed to every cruelty which savage ingenuity could devise. Their bodies were torn asunder by wild horses, and their mutilated limbs left unburied. Attila overran the rich plains of Lombardy, and established himself in the palace of Milan. The senate of Rome, terror-stricken, sent an embassage to implore peace of the barbarian. Attila demanded the Princess Honoria, daughter of the Emperor Valentinian, for his bride, and one-half of the kingdom of Italy as her dowry. While negotiations were pending, and Honoria was trembling in anticipation of her dreadful doom, the fierce Hun ravaged large portions of Gaul and Italy at the head of half a million of warriors as fierce and merciless as wolves.

The victorious Hun retired to the wilds of the North to replenish his diminished hordes, threatening to return and inflict still more signal vengeance, unless the bride he demanded, and the dowry claimed with her, were immediately granted him. In the mean time, he added to his harem of innumerable wives a beautiful maiden named Idaho.

“Their marriage,” writes Gibbon, “was celebrated with barbarian pomp and festivity at his wooden palace beyond the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and sleep, retired at a late hour from the banquet to the nuptial-couch. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures or his repose the greater part of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and, after attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length broke into the royal apartment. They found the trembling bride sitting by the bedside, hiding her face with her veil, and lamenting her own danger, as well as the death of the king, who had expired during the night. An artery had suddenly burst; and, as Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of blood, which, instead of finding a passage through the nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach. His body was solemnly exposed in the midst of the plain under a silken pavilion; and the chosen squadrons of the Huns, wheeling around in measured evolutions, chanted a funeral-song in memory of a hero glorious in his life, invincible in his death, the father of his people, and the terror of the world.

“According to their national custom, the barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors. The remains of Attila were enclosed within three coffins,—of gold, of silver, and of iron,—and were privately buried in the night. The spoils of nations were thrown into his grave. The captives who had opened the ground were inhumanly massacred; and the same Huns who had indulged such excessive grief, feasted, with dissolute and intemperate mirth, about the recent sepulchre of their king.”

Valentinian inveigled a noble lady, alike illustrious for beauty and piety, to his palace, where he treated her with such indignities as to rouse to the highest pitch the wrath of her husband and friends. A conspiracy was formed by her husband Maximus, a Roman senator; and Valentinian died beneath the daggers which his crimes had unsheathed. The solders placed the diadem upon the brow of Maximus. His wife soon after died; and he endeavored to compel Eudoxia, the widow of Valentinian, to become his spouse. She recoiled from throwing herself into the arms of the murderer of her husband, and appealed for aid to Genseric, one of those powerful Vandal kings who had wrested Africa from the Roman empire.

Genseric joyfully espoused her cause. With a large fleet he entered the Tiber, advanced to Rome, and captured the city. In the struggle, Maximus was slain, and unhappy Rome was surrendered to the Moors and the Vandals to be pillaged for fourteen days. The barbarian Genseric carried back into the wilds of Africa, as slaves, Eudoxia, the widowed Empress of Rome, and her two daughters. Many other Roman matrons and maidens swelled the long train of captives who were dragged into life-long bondage.

“Eudoxia,” writes Gibbon, “was rudely stripped of her jewels; and the unfortunate empress, with her two daughters, the only surviving remains of the great Theodosius, was compelled as a captive to follow the haughty Vandal, who immediately hoisted sail, and returned, with a prosperous navigation, to the port of Carthage. Many thousand Romans of both sexes, chosen for some useful or agreeable qualifications, reluctantly embarked on board the fleet of Genseric; and their distress was aggravated by the unfeeling barbarians, who, in the division of the booty, separated the wives from their husbands, and the children from their parents.”

The whole world seemed to be now essentially in the condition of a city surrendered to the mob. There was no stable government anywhere. There was nowhere peace or prosperity or joy. Man’s corruption had filled the earth with misery. Still there were thousands of individual Christians, in obscurity and through much tribulation, struggling nobly to their throne and their crown in heaven.

It is difficult to conceive of a more melancholy spectacle than Italy presented. The barbarians were masters of the whole Peninsula. Odoacer, a stern Gothic warrior, after several years of the wildest anarchy, with wars and assassinations too numerous to mention, in the year 476 compelled the Roman senate by a formal decree to abolish the imperial succession, and to recognize him as the military chieftain of Italy. Thus, after the decay of ages, the Roman empire fell, to rise no more.

Sagaciously this ferocious barbarian respected time-honored institutions. He conferred upon his captains titles of dukes and counts, thus perpetuating and extending the feudal system. The Roman nobles, surrendering themselves to all sensual indulgence, had sunk into the lowest debasement. A contemporary historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, gives the following graphic account of the aristocracy of Rome at that time:—

“The ostentation of presenting the rent-roll of their estates provokes the resentment of every man who remembers that their poor ancestors were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers. The modern nobles measure their rank by the splendor of their carriages and the magnificence of their dress. Followed by a train of fifty slaves, they sweep the streets with impetuous speed. When they condescend to visit the public baths, they assume a tone of loud and insolent command, and appropriate to themselves conveniences designed for the Roman people. Sometimes they visit their plantations in the country, and, by the toil of servile hands, engage in the amusements of the chase. When they travel, they are followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior servants, accompanied by a promiscuous crowd of slaves and dependent plebeians. They express exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and contemptuous indifference for all the rest of the human species. Should they call for some water, and a slave be tardy in bringing it, the slave would be punished with three hundred lashes.

“A sure method of introduction to the society of the great is skill in gambling. The confederates are united by an indissoluble bond of friendship, or rather of conspiracy. The acquisition of knowledge seldom engages their attention who abhor the fatigue and disdain the advantages of study. The distress which chastises extravagant luxury often reduces them to the most humiliating expedients. When they wish to borrow, they are as suppliant as a slave. When called upon to pay, they assume airs of indolence, as if they were the grandsons of Hercules.”

Italy had indeed fallen: the barbaric leader of a semi-civilized band was her enthroned monarch. During a reign of fourteen years, vast crowds of emigrants from the bleak realms north of the Rhine and the Danube flocked into sunny Italy.

They received a cordial welcome from Odoacer, and rapidly blended with the people among whom they took up their residence. But fertile and beautiful Italy was too rich a prize in the eyes of the powerful Northern nations to be long left in the undisputed possession of Odoacer.

Upon the northern banks of the Euxine Sea there was a populous nation called the Ostrogoths. Their king, Theodoric, had been educated at Constantinople, and was a civilized man, reigning over a comparatively barbaric people. He commenced his march upon Italy, accompanied by the whole nation.

“The march of Theodoric,” says Gibbon, “must be considered as the emigration of an entire people. Each bold barbarian who had heard of the wealth and beauty of Italy was impatient to seek, through the most perilous adventures, the possession of such enchanting objects.