eir actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without
fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a
state of perpetual fluctuation. The bishops locally situated in these
changing districts would have been themselves divided. In fact, the Arian
bishops had no common centre. They were the nominees and partisans of their
several sovereigns. They presented no one front, for their negation was no
one faith. We cannot be wrong in extending the action assigned by Gibbon to
the hundred bishops of Gaul, to the Catholic bishops throughout all the
countries in which a poorer Catholic population was governed by Arian
rulers. The divine bond of the Primacy, resting upon the faith which it
represented, secured in one alliance all the bishops of the West. Nor must
we forget that the Throne of Peter acknowledged by those bishops as the
source of their common faith, the crown of the episcopate, was likewise
regarded by the Arian rulers themselves as the great throne of justice,
above the sway of local jealousies and subordinate jurisdictions. It
represented to their eyes the fabric of Roman law, the wonderful creation
of centuries, which the northern conquerors were utterly unable to emulate,
and made them feel how inferior brute force was to civil wisdom and equity.

In the constitution of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain from the time of
Rechared, when it became Catholic, we see the first fruits of the Church's
beneficent action on the northern invaders. The barbarian monarchy from its
original condition of a military command in time of war, directing a raid
of the tribe or people upon its enemies, becomes a settled rule, at the
head of estates which meet in annual synod, and in which bishops and barons
sit side by side. Government reposes on the peaceable union of the Two
Powers. In process of time this sort of political order was established
everywhere throughout the West, by the same action and influence of the
Church. In the Roman empire the supreme power had been in its origin a
mandate conferred by the citizens of a free state on one of their number
for the preservation of the commonwealth. The notion of dynastic descent
was wanting to it from the beginning. But the power which Augustus had
received in successive periods of ten years passed to his successors for
their life. Still they were rather life-presidents with royal power than
kings. And it may be noticed that in that long line n