tricter than the Benedictine. Then came a theological
and disciplinary controversy with Virgil, the Irish bishop of Salzburg,
who held, among other heresies, that there were other worlds than ours.
Virgil must have been a most remarkable man; in spite of his leanings
toward science he held his own against Boniface, and was canonized after
his death. Boniface was more successful in France. There a certain
Adalbert or Aldebert, a Frankish bishop of Neustria, had caused great
disturbance. He had been performing miracles, and claimed to have
received his relics, not from Rome like those of Boniface, but directly
from the angels. Planting crosses in the open fields he drew the people
to desert the churches, and had won a great following throughout all
Neustria. Opinions are divided as to whether he was a Culdee, a
representative of a national Frankish movement, or simply the charlatan
that Boniface paints him. At the instance of Pippin, Boniface secured
Adalbert's condemnation at the synod of Soissons in 744; but he, and
Clement, a Scottish missionary and a heretic on predestination,
continued to find followers in spite of legate, council and pope, for
three or four years more.

Between 746 and 748 Boniface was made bishop of Mainz, and became
metropolitan over the Rhine bishoprics and Utrecht, as well as over
those he had established in Germany--thus founding the pre-eminence of
the see of Mainz. In 747 a synod of the Frankish bishops sent to Rome a
formal statement of their submission to the papal authority. The
significance of this act can only be realized when one recalls the
tendencies toward the formation of national churches, which had been so
powerful under the Merovingians. Boniface does not seem to have taken
part in the anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks in 752. In 754 he
resigned his archbishopric in favour of Lull, and took up again his
earliest plan of a mission to Frisia; but on the 5th of June 754 he and
his companions were massacred by the heathen near Dockum. His remains
were afterwards taken to Fulda.

St Boniface has well been called the proconsul of the papacy. His
organizing genius, even more than his missionary zeal, left its mark
upon the German church throughout all the middle ages. The missionary
movement which until his day had been almost independent of control,
largely carried on by schismatic Irish monks, was brought under the
direction of Rome. But in so welding together the scattered c