ess by the free and public judgment of their peers."

We have here the historian, who is one of the bitterest enemies of the
Christian Church and Faith, avowing that the barbarian Visigoths received
from the hands of that Church and Faith, at the end of the sixth century,
the great institutions of a limited Christian monarchy, consecrated by the
Church, in which the king at his accession solemnly avowed his
responsibility for his exercise of the immense functions entrusted to him;
also of parliaments, in which clergy and laity sat together in common
deliberation upon the affairs of the State, grievances were redressed, and
laws for the benefit of king and people passed; in fact, a reign of legal
government, based upon law and justice, and confirmed by religious
sanction.

And in all this the hand of the Pope was seen, sending to the chief bishop
of Spain the pallium direct from the body of St. Peter, on which it had
been laid, as the visible symbol of apostolic power dwelling in the
Apostle's See, and radiating from it.

This is the first instance, and not the least striking, of a fact which
lies at the foundation of modern Europe; for so the Teuton war leaders
became Christian kings, and so the northern barbarians were changed into
Christian nations. For that which Gibbon here describes took place in all
the Teuton peoples who accepted the Catholic faith. He has elsewhere said:
"The progress of Christianity has been marked by two glorious and decisive
victories: over the learned and luxurious citizens of the Roman empire, and
over the warlike barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the
empire and embraced the religion of the Romans".[211]

Of this latter victory we can celebrate the accomplishment, as St. Gregory
did, in the words of the angelic hymn, but the details have not been
preserved for us, even in the scanty proportion which we possess concerning
the former. Fighting for thirty years with the Lombards for the very
existence of Rome, Gregory was the contemporary and witness of this second
victory. Not until the Arian heresy was subdued by the Catholic faith could
it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third
degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the
domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the
received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger
mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the b