the beginning of the
fifth century, drawn by M. Beugnot, on the authority of the ecclesiastical
writers, is, indeed, as gloomy as that of Roman society in general, which
had been so graphically described about the same time by the pagan author
Ammianus Marcellinus, and reproduced by Gibbon. It was very natural that
such a corrupted soil should produce the rankest growth of superstition,
and rapidly bring about that melancholy reaction which was not inaptly
styled by Gibbon, "the revival of polytheism in the Christian church."
This wretched state of things was, as I have said before, chiefly due to
that policy of compromise by which the leaders of the church sought to get
as many Pagans as possible into her pale, and who consequently were
baptised without being converted. This compromise with Paganism was often
carried to great extremes; and the history of the conversion of Florence,
which I have extracted from M. Beugnot's work, gives one of the most
striking instances of those unprincipled proceedings:--"Florence paid
particular honours to the god Mars. It was not without regret that it
abandoned the worship of this divinity. The time of its conversion had
been assigned to the second or the third century, but the vagueness of
this date deprives it of all authority. Yet, whatever may have been the
century in which the conversion of Florence took place, it could not be a
subject of edification and joy to the Christians. The traditions of that
city predicted to it great calamities if the statue of Mars was either
sullied, or put into a place unworthy of it. The Florentines stipulated,
therefore, on accepting the new religion, that Mars should be respected.
His statue was consequently neither broken nor sullied, but it was
carefully taken from his temple, and placed on a pedestal near the river,
which flows through the city. Many years after this, the new Christians
feared and invoked that god who was dethroned only by halves. When almost
all the pagan temples had fallen either by the stroke of time, or under
the blows of the Christians, the heathen palladium of Florence stood still
erect on the banks of the Arno; and, according to one of the most
enlightened historians that Italy has produced during the middle ages (G.
Villani, lib. i., cap. 60), the demon who had remained in the statue
realised, in the thirteenth century, the old prediction of the
Etruscans.(50) Compromises of the kind which took place at Florence became