d all they failed
for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic. The future
belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and
the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to
be heretic, was to fail. The great attempt, the noble attempt of
Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy
especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far
as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy
forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement. When that movement
ceased to be Catholic it failed.

Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age
depends upon it. Justinian's success in Italy was a Catholic success.
What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians
since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism. Justinian, a
great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the
Arian Goths. He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause.
But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that,
for all they could do, they had no success. The Lombards, never very
eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic,
and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of
turning them out of Italy. It is only what is in the mind that is of
any fundamental account. Face to face with such a thing as religion,
race is as a tale that is told. But though all hope of turning the
Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of
Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered
a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless
and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople,
fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic. It was the gradual
failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to
the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up
even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies
passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too.
During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century,
the _coup de grace_, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan
by the Iconoclastic heresy.

The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared
in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of
Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, "ignorant of sacred