Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 26

Taking in all this time the simple witness of history, I ask if in it the words of our Lord to Peter were not palpably fulfilled: “Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church”. If the Rock had not been, each one in this long line of heresies would have destroyed the Church. The line of St. Athanasius was not infallible; the line of St. Ignatius of Antioch was annulled after frequent falls by the Mohammedan captivity; the line of Byzantium had some saints, but was prolific in heretics, and the last utterance of Jerusalem before it fell, when the Saracen ascetic voluptuary trod its courts, was uttered by its patriarch from Calvary itself, when he adjured his messenger: “Go swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See, in which the foundations of our holy doctrine rest”.

The state of the eastern Church from the Council of Chalcedon to the final assault of the emperor Leo III. upon the whole fabric of Church government is one continual descent. It has certain recoveries, as the cessation of the Acacian schism, in 518; as the reversal of the Monothelite tyranny, under Constantine Pogonatus, in 680; as the repudiation of the still greater Iconoclast tyranny a century later, at the Seventh Council in 787, under Pope Adrian and the patriarch Tarasius. But even General Councils were attacked by eastern emperors in the last excesses of their overgrown domination. As Philippicus Bardanes got together a great Council in 711 to denounce the Sixth Council, so the Emperor Leo the Armenian had deposed an unbending patriarch, Nicephorus, in 815, supplied his place with the yielding Theodotus, and found another council in the same year to anathematise the work of the Seventh Council. Three more Iconoclast patriarchs – Theodotus from 815 to 821, Antonius I. from 821 to 832, John VII. from 831 to 841 – close this evil list of heretical bishops. The feast of orthodoxy was established in 842. The incessant attempts of the Greek emperors to meddle with the faith took presently another development. They could no longer oppress as their subject a sovereign Pope. When they could not oppress him, they learnt to deny him. In less than another generation the schism of Photius began.

Such was the first century running from the time that Leo the Isaurian made, in 733, his creature Anastasius ecumenical in the sense that all the remaining Greek empire was put under his patriarchal jurisdiction. But it is plain that long before this, the Greek empire, so far as its own episcopate was concerned, had ceased to possess any inflexible rule of doctrine. The most venerable of its authorities, the original patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, had yielded before the Nestorian and Monothelite storms; had perpetual interruptions in their succession, sometimes had a double succession – one Catholic, another Monophysite – had submitted to the State-patriarch set over them at Constantinople; and being found in this condition by the Mohammedan flood, had seen their former dignity all but overwhelmed in its swelling waves. The western Church, which from the time of the northern wandering of the nations had been visited by unnumbered catastrophes, had, on the contrary, possessed in its bosom exactly that inflexible rule of doctrine which the East wanted: a rule of doctrine not imposed by civil despotism, but the very root as well as the bond of its episcopate. The Ostrogoth had made his kingdom in Italy, and the Visigoth his kingdom in Spain; the Frank, the Burgundian, and many more set up realms in France and Germany, whose limits were in perpetual fluctuation; seven or eight little Saxon kingdoms were dividing in Britain the old Roman unity. These Teuton tribes had two qualities in common – great personal valour and the most persisting spirit of division. Endless were the intestine quarrels and separations between those of the same northern race, who in political condition had hardly passed the tribal state. Every invading army whose commander became a king in the conquered territory had its own local interests, but none of that great political sense which had nurtured the empire of the Cæsars. The one Ostrogoth who had such a sense had grown up a hostage at Constantinople, and though it is said that he could not read, had certainly divined and carried off with him into the Italy which he captured the imperial secret of government: that is, the force of unity, justice, and subordination of the part to the whole; and Theodorich had come to the conclusion that he could not make Italian mind and Gothic manners coalesce in the structure of a kingdom. His device to rule them equally and separately scarcely lasted for his life. After ruling with equity, he died in remorse. No stronger instance of this great defeat can be found than the custom of the Merovingian race to the end. Their monarchy was in their eyes a family property. When their father died they took the throne as a part of the paternal inheritance. It was not delivered down in whole as a mighty trust of the nation itself. If there were several children, their swords cut the patrimony into slices, and each carried off his bit, like a wild beast. No political sense presided here. The sole solicitude of each was that his lot might not be of less value than his brother's.

There exists no history giving in detail the most wonderful event of these troubled centuries – that is, the process by which the Arian heresy, which, in the time of Theodorich, had possession of all these peoples – except the Franks, and the Saxons, who were pagans – finally became Catholic: a conquest of the northern warriors which one of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith seems to consider a more wonderful deed than the conquest of the former Roman world, so far as it was achieved at the time of Constantine's conversion.

At Rome the Pope sat through all these centuries, the visible representative of all that was good in the Roman empire, of law, justice, order, besides holding in himself the inflexible rule of faith. The Chair of Peter had no rival in the West, the eldest of its bishops looked up with reverence to his single and immemorial pre-eminence. Their local influence had in each of them its weight with their own people. For instance, St. Gregory of Tours was of an old senatorian Gallic family: all the interests of the population around him, whether Frank or Gallic, known to him as a native of the soil. In this double position much nearer and dearer to him was the Petrine descent, by consecration of which he maintained as bishop the Christian faith. Thus in the see of Tours he protected the temporal rights of his people, and resisted in particular the violent acts of king Chilperic. The faith itself was to him the strong exemplar of political sense: the one family of Christ bore in its very bosom the society of nations. He could not say the creed without feeling that the centre of faith was the natural centre of all humanising influence. The Saxon bishop in Northumberland would recognise the Saxon bishop in Kent in spite of intervening Mercia. The episcopate set up among the German tribes by St. Boniface in the name of the Popes, was the form of such unity as afterwards led these separate tribes to coalesce in an empire. And they coalesced with such difficulty as to show that without the spiritual bond they would have remained in their original antagonism.

In the last century of Merovingian rule the inapt government and private vices – if a king's vices can ever be called private – had inflicted a very great injury both on the civil and the ecclesiastical administration of the great Frank empire. The intercourse in writing between the Popes of the sixth century with the Frank rulers had been greatly interrupted in the seventh. While perpetual domestic murders and sensual crimes polluted the royal family, the nobility had become disordered; national councils were suspended, and in too many sees the bishops no longer answered in character to those who, in the time of Gregory the Great, had built up Gaul. At that moment there sprung from two great nobles of Austrasian Gaul, Arnulf, afterwards bishop of Metz, and Pipin of Landen, a family whose saintly virtues as well as their nobility raised it to great power. In 673 Pipin d'Herstal, who by his father descended in the second degree from Arnulf, and by his mother from Pipin of Landen, was mayor of the palace, and the degenerate blood of Chilperic and Fredegonde was put to shame by the chief minister of the kingdom. The race of Clovis was dying out in sensual cruelty: the family of Arnulf was raised up to take its place. In forty years, Pipin d'Herstal, as mayor of the palace, used the royal power with such effect as greatly to restore the unity of the kingdom. After his death and an interval of trouble his son Charles, in 707, united in his hands all the power of the Franks. It was just a hundred years from the death of Mohammed, when, in 732, the Saracen army having under his chalifs conquered all the East and the South, and over-run Spain, had only one more battle to fight with the bravest nation of the West, in order to trample the cross under their feet. The flood had passed the Pyrenees, and advanced over prostrate Aquitaine to Poitiers, which it had taken. As it issued from that city, the bastard son of Pipin d'Herstal, still mayor of the palace in name, but sovereign of the Franks in fact, met it with the rapidly collected warriors whom he had so often led to victory. Then, it is said, the Saracen and the Christian hosts for seven days watched each other; the Arabs on their light horses and in their white mantles, the Franks with their heavy iron-clad masses. On the eighth day, a Saturday at the end of October, the Arabs left their camp at the call of the Muezin to prayer, and drew out their order of battle. Their strength was in their horsemen, and twenty times they charged the Frankish squares, and were unable to break them. An Arab writer says: “Abd Errahman, trusting to his fortune, made a fierce attack. The Christians returned it with as much firmness. Then the fight became general and continued with great loss on both sides. Assault followed upon assault until four o'clock in the afternoon. The Frankish line stood like a wall of iron.” Then a cry for succour was heard from the Arab camp. Duke Eudo with his Aquitains and Basques had surprised those left to guard it. Disorder and panic arose among the Saracens. Charles saw and ordered the whole line to advance. The wall of iron moved and all fell before it. Abd Errahman passed from rank to rank to check the flight, and did wonders. But when, struck by many lances, he fell from his horse, disorder and flight prevailed. They burst into the camp and expelled Eudo. Night came on, and Charles kept his army in its ranks on the plain, expecting a fresh battle on the morrow. On that morrow the Franks saw the white tents, but the Arabs had fled under cover of the night. The booty was great. The Franks report that there was no pursuit; the Arabs, that the Christians pursued their victory for many days, and compelled the fugitives to many battles, in which the loss was great, until the Moslem host threw itself into Narbonne.

In that battle Charles merited his title of “the Hammer”. Had he or his Franks blenched upon that day, Europe would have become Mohammedan, as three hundred years before in the battle of the nations by Macon it would have been the prey of the Mongol, had Attila prevailed. Carcassonne and Nimes and all southern France had yielded. But the hammer of Charles descended on the Saracen anvil. His son, king Pipin, carried on his work in southern France, and his grandson Charles, before his death, had become lord of an united realm from the Ebro to the Eyder. Islam never advanced further in the West. As France in the fifteenth century owed its deliverance to the maiden of Arc, so in the eighth, not Gaul only, but all the West would seem to have owed its inheritance of the Christian name to the four great men whom Providence raised up in the family of Arnulf of Metz, and Pipin of Landen. Pipin, the mayor of the palace, Charles the Hammer, Pipin the king, and Charlemagne, are four continuous generations from grandfather to greatgrandson the like of which I know not that any other family can produce.

An old man so feeble that he had hardly strength to cross the Alps, and was almost killed by the exertion, laid his hand on the head of Pipin, and the mayor of the palace became king of the Franks. The hand was the hand of St. Peter. Forty-six years later the same hand will be laid upon the head of his son; and the king of the Franks will become emperor of the Romans; and the Saracens who felt the arm of one Charles in the battle by Tours, will feel another Charles rise up before them to meet the Moslem lord of the southern and eastern world on equal terms.

After Charles left Rome, at Easter, 774, as above narrated, attempts were made against him by the Lombard dukes, and Adelchis, the son of Desiderius. In spite of the Saxon wars he was in upper Italy at the end of the winter of 776: he prevailed over his opponents, sent his counts to the various cities, and protected the State of the Church. At the end of 780 he was again at Pavia, and he celebrated the feast of Easter on April 15, 781, at Rome. Here Pope Adrian crowned his son Pipin king of Lombardy, and the youngest, Louis, king of Aquitania. All seemed to go well. Greek messengers from the regent Irene, widow of Leo IV., brought proposals of agreement and treaty. During this longer sojourn the new arrangement of the Lombard kingdom would be completed. Frankish counts took the place of the old dukes, whose relation to the central power had been far looser than that of their successors was made.

The introduction of the royal missi and their action upon the administration of law likened subject Italy much more to the other states of Charles. The position of the native population was not essentially altered, but the improvement of the laws helped them. Charles all the while was carrying on war after war with the resisting Saxons, enlarging the Christian domain by founding bishoprics as far as the Weser and the Elbe, taking the Spanish marches from the Arab, and the eastern marches from the Avars, uniting the dukedom of Bavaria with his kingdom, and carrying out that mighty work of civilisation which has made his name immortal for its religious institutions, its legislation, and the encouragement which he gave to literature.

Early in the year 787 Charles was again with Pope Adrian at Rome. In a rapid campaign he reduced to his obedience Arichis, duke of Benevento, who was married to a daughter of Desiderius; and returning once more spent Easter with Adrian. It was the last meeting between those two fast friends. On Christmas day, 795, Adrian closed a pontificate of nearly twenty-four years. Three years before Rome had been desolated by one of its most fearful inundations, and the Pope had gone about in a boat succouring the needy. This pontificate was both in its spiritual and temporal consequences most brilliant. Adrian possessed every quality which should adorn a great Pope, a tender and active piety, a zeal the ardour of which was tempered by wisdom: a union of goodness and resolution, so that in the exercise of his charge he combined the affection of a father with the authority of a teacher, and the vigilance of a Pope. Charles mourned for him both as a friend and father. He had an inscription of thirty-eight verses engraved in golden letters on the black marble stone which covered his tomb. He had Masses said for his soul in all churches; and dispensed great alms in distant lands, especially to England. In his letter to Offa, king of Mercia, he wrote: – “We have sent you these alms begging intercession for the Apostolic Lord Adrian, not that we doubt, that that blessed soul is at peace, but to show our faith and affection for a most dear friend”. It cannot be doubted that Adrian's influence upon the great king, since he first came to Rome in 774, had prepared him for the future exaltation which he was to receive in that same church of St. Peter, the steps of which he had ascended on his knees twenty-six years before. The day after Adrian's death, Leo III. was chosen his successor. He was by birth a Roman, and brought up in the patriarchal palace, and is described by contemporaries as learned, eloquent, and beneficent.

From the gift of king Pipin to Pope Stephen II., when the keys of the cities surrendered to him were laid upon the altar over the body of St. Peter, to the repetition of that gift by Charles in 774, and again from that most solemn action of Charles to the year 800, no difference in the relation of the Pope to the king of the Franks took place. In the first instance, in the year 754, Charles had been made Patricius of the Roman Church together with his father, and had as such taken on himself its protection and defence. Therefore the Popes took pains, in particular Leo III., that the Romans acknowledged under oath this relation, binding themselves to observe the rules which their Patricius should make for the security of the Church. No conclusion can be drawn from this, as to an overlordship of the king of the Franks in the territories assigned to the Pope. Pope Adrian and Leo III. sent to Charles a standard together with the keys of St. Peter's tomb. The jurisdiction which the king of the Franks exercised in Rome as Patricius was not an overlordship; it was necessary for his office as Protector. But now an extraordinary event took place. In the year 799, three years after the accession of Leo III., a tumult broke out which in its savage violence surpassed that under Stephen III. On April 25, St. Mark's day, the Pope was conducting the solemn procession ordered by St. Gregory the Great, from the Lateran to St. Lorenzo in Lucina. A band of conspirators broke out of the Flaminian way, not far from the Church of St. Silvester. At their head were two nephews of the late Pope Adrian: Paschalis, the Primicerius, that is, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and Campulus, the treasurer, another of them, both in immediate attendance on the Pope. Leo III. was thrown to the ground, and an attempt made to tear out his eyes and his tongue. He was dragged into the Church of St. Silvester, and thence taken to the monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cælian.

The conspirators had not succeeded, as they hoped, in blinding the Pope. His wounds were wonderfully healed. His friends rescued him on a dark night from his confinement in the monastery, and brought him safely to St Peter's. A large number of the people and clergy surrounded him. The Frank duke came from Spoleto with a hurriedly collected troop, took him from St. Peter's, and carried him to Spoleto, where again bishops, priests, and laity surrounded him with congratulations.

When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At Paderborn he learnt of the Pope's approach. He sent to him archbishop Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to the cathedral.

Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.

The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the king a list of accusations against the Pope.

The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy, senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons, Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St. Peter's, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city, and took again possession of the Lateran.

In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in the Pope's possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St. Peter's, where the people waited for him in the usual order.

The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to clear the Pope from the accusations brought against him, and for this purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter's of archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one voice: ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors, and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”

After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were again assembled in the same church of St. Peter's. Charles, at the request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature, was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. celebrated High Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”

And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord. And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king his son.

Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St. Peter's primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes. During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and placed a nobler and more religious house on the throne of the Franks. Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son, during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory, and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St. Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its master, Christendom. The eastern emperor in his ardour to impose heresy, had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any civil subjection to the eastern.

Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from the Tagus to the Indus.

First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal, but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor's charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title, of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or Germans, nor dependent on the Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank, and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans. As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor; and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.

The annalists of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God's authority we have this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo, that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was that among the kings there should be one, already most powerful by the extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800. Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of things. So far already had Arius anticipated Mohammed. Against this confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power, and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above, by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ's religion, and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused. The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East; had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer with Christian name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian. Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.