s and crimes of the disputants, while
the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks, who swarm out of their
dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched battles with each other.
The ecclesiastical history of the fifth century in the Eastern Empire is
one, which not even the genius of a Gibbon or a Milman can make
interesting, or even intelligible.

Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had seen
actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the Eutychian
Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his foster father
the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman forcibly puts it)
'flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use of his legs by
standing sixteen years upon a column.' Recollect that Dietrich and his
Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his throne; and then
understand in what a school he had learnt his great ideas of religious
toleration: how deep must have been the determination to have no such
doings in his kingdom; how deep, too, the dread of any similar outbreak
at Rome.

Recollect, also, that now in his old age he had just witnessed the same
iniquities again rending the Eastern Empire; the old Emperor Anastasius
hunted to death by armies of mad monks about the Monophysite Heresy; the
cities, even the holiest places of the East, stained with Christian
blood; everywhere mob-law, murder, treachery, assassination even in the
house of God; and now the new Emperor Justin was throwing himself into
the party of the Orthodox with all the blind rage of an ignorant peasant;
persecuting, expelling, shutting up the Arian Churches of the Goths,
refusing to hear Dietrich's noble appeals; and evidently organizing a
great movement against those peaceable Arians, against whom, during the
life-time of Dietrich, their bitterest enemies do not allege a single
case of persecution.

Remember, too, that Dietrich had had experience of similar outbreaks of
fanaticism at Rome; that the ordination of two rival Popes had once made
the streets run with blood; that he had seen priests murdered,
monasteries fired, nuns insulted, and had had to interfere with the
strong arm of the law, and himself decide in favour of the Pope who had
the most votes, and was first chosen; and that in the quarrels,
intrigues, and slanders, which followed that election, he had had too
good proof that the ecclesiastics and the mob of Rome, if he but let
them, could behave as ill as t