ch Christianity as they possessed was wholly
Arian, they were but little removed from mere heathenism. It is true
that they sacked churches, slaughtered priests, and carried off the
holy vessels everywhere as they came into Italy; but they did this, it
would seem, not from a sectarian hatred of the Catholic Faith, but
from mere heathenism. As pagans, heathen or semi-heathen, they might
be converted, and thus their advent was ultimately less dangerous to
our civilisation than the conquest of the Ostrogoths threatened to be.
I do not mean to suggest that that advent was without danger. It was
of course full of dreadful peril, but that peril was chiefly material
and not spiritual; it could destroy, but not create; moreover, since
in the main it was pagan, it could only destroy material things.

It is unthinkable that the Italy of the sixth century was for a moment
in danger of losing its Faith, of being dechristianised. That, all
things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had
more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and
especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism,
which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we
know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith
the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth
century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians
is not to be thought of. To this extent, and it is three parts at
least of the whole, the Lombard invasion was less perilous than those
which had come and passed away before it. Once more, the Catholic
church was to be victorious, but in a different fashion. It cast out
the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths from Italy,
for it could not convert them; the Lombards it converted and they
remained. It converted them because they were rather heathen than
Arian, and the victory was won by that great Gregory who, seeing our
forefathers in the Forum of Rome, and loving them for their bright
hair and open faces--_non Angli sed Angeli si Christiani_--sent S.
Austin to turn them too from their pagan rites and gather them into
the fold of Christ.

But there was something else beside the fact that the Lombards were
pagan, and therefore to be converted, which was a part of the
salvation of Italy.

It is possible that the Lombards might have been as Catholic as the
Franks and yet, barbarians as they were, have destroye