emperor at Constantinople was blockaded, the churches were besieged, and the streets commanded by furious bands of contending monks.1 Repressed for a time, the riots broke out two years after with an increased ferocity, and almost every leading city of the East was filled by the monks with bloodshed and with riots.2 St. Augustine himself is accused of having excited every kind of popular persecution against the Semi-Pelagians. The Councils, animated by an almost frantic hatred, urged on by their anathemas the rival sects. In the Robber Council' of Ephesus, Flavianus, the Bishop of Constantinople, was kicked and beaten by the Bishop of Alexandria, or at least by his followers, and a few days later died from the effect of the blows. In the contested election that

1 Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, vol. i. pp. 310-311.

2 Ibid. vol. i. pp. 314-318. Dean Milman thus sums up the history: 'Monks in Alexandria, monks in Antioch, monks in Jerusalem, monks in Constantinople, decide peremptorily on orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The bishops themselves cower before them. Macedonius in Constantinople, Flavianus in Antioch, Elias in Jerusalem, condemn themselves and abdicate, or are driven from their sees. Persecution is universal-persecution by every means of violence and cruelty; the only question is, in whose hands is the power to persecute. . . . Bloodshed, murder, treachery, assassination, even during the public worship of God - these are the frightful means by which each party strives to maintain its opinions and to defeat its adversary."

3 See a striking passage from Julianus of Eclana, cited by Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, vol. i. p. 164.

'Nowhere is Christianity less attractive than in the Councils of the church. . . . Intrigue, injustice, violence, decisions on authority alone, and that the authority of a turbulent majority . . . detract from the reverence and impugn the judgments of at least the later Councils. The close is almost invariably a terrible anathema, in which it is impossible not to discern the tones of human hatred, of arrogant triumph, of rejoicing at the damnation imprecated against the humiliated adversary.'-Ibid. vol. i. p. 202.

5 See the account of this scene in Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xlvii.; Milman, Latin Christianity, vol. i. p. 263. There is a conflict of authorities as to whether the Bishop of Alexandria himself kicked his adversary, or, to speak more correctly, the act which is charged against him by some

issued in the election of St. Damasus as Pope of Rome, though no theological question appears to have been at issue, the riots were so fierce, that one hundred and thirty-seven corpses were found in one of the churches.1 The precedent of the Jewish persecutions of idolatry having been adduced by St. Cyprian, in the third century, in favour of excommunication,2 was urged by Optatus, in the reign of Constantine, in favour of persecuting the Donatists; in the next reign we find a large body of Christians presenting to the emperor a petition, based upon this precedent, imploring him to destroy by force the Pagan worship. About fifteen years later, the whole Christian Church was prepared, on the same grounds, to support the persecuting policy of St. Ambrose, the contending sects having found, in the duty of crushing religious liberty, the solitary tenet on which they were agreed. The most unaggressive and unobtrusive forms of Paganism were persecuted with the same ferocity. To offer a sacrifice was to commit a capital offence; to hang up a simple chaplet was to incur the forfeiture of an estate. The noblest works of Asiatic architecture and of Greek sculpture perished by the same iconoclasm that shattered the humble temple at which the peasant loved to pray, or the household gods which consecrated his home. There were no varieties of belief

contemporary writers is not charged against him by others. The violence was certainly done by his followers and in his presence.

Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. 3.

2 Cyprian, Ep. lxi. 4 Ibid. iii. 10.

3 Milman, Hist. of Christianity, vol. ii. p. 306. 5 By this time the Old Testament language and sentiment with regard to idolatry were completely incorporated with the Christian feeling; and when Ambrose enforced on a Christian emperor the sacred duty of intolerance against opinions and practices which scarcely a century before had been the established religion of the empire, his zeal was supported by almost the unanimous applause of the Christian world.'-Milman's Hist. of Christianity, vol. iii. p. 159.

See the Theodosian laws of Paganism.

too minute for the new intolerance to embitter. The question of the proper time of celebrating Easter was believed to involve the issue of salvation or damnation ;1 and when, long after, in the fourteenth century, the question of the nature of the light at the transfiguration was discussed at Constantinople, those who refused to admit that that light was uncreated, were deprived of the honours of Christian burial.2

Together with these legislative and ecclesiastical measures, a literature arose surpassing in its mendacious ferocity any other the world had known. The polemical writers habitually painted as dæmons those who diverged from the orthodox belief, gloated with a vindictive piety over the sufferings of the heretic upon earth, as upon a Divine punishment, and sometimes, with an almost superhuman malice, passing in imagination beyond the threshold of the grave, exulted in no ambiguous terms on the tortures which they believed to be reserved for him for ever. A few men, such as Synesius, Basil, or Salvian, might still find some excellence in Pagans or heretics, but their candour was altogether exceptional; and he who will compare the beautiful pictures the Greek poets gave of their Trojan adversaries, or the Roman historians of the enemies of their country, with those which ecclesiastical writers, for many centuries, almost invariably gave of all who were opposed to their Church,

1 This appears from the whole history of the controversy; but the prevailing feeling is, I think, expressed with peculiar vividness in the following passage Eadmer says (following the words of Bede) in Colman's times there was a sharp controversy about the observing of Easter, and other rules of life for churchmen; therefore, this question deservedly excited the minds and feeling of many people, fearing lest, perhaps, after having received the name of Christians, they should run, or had run in vain.'-King's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, book ii. ch. vi.

2 Gibbon, chap. Ixiii.

may easily estimate the extent to which cosmopolitan sympathy had retrograded.

At the period, however, when the Western monasteries began to discharge their intellectual functions, the supremacy of Catholicism was nearly established, and polemical ardour had begun to wane. The literary zeal of the Church took other forms, but all were deeply tinged by the monastic spirit. It is difficult or impossible to conceive what would have been the intellectual future of the world had Catholicism never arisen-what principles or impulses would have guided the course of the human mind, or what new institutions would have been created for its culture. Under the influence of Catholicism, the monastery became the one sphere of intellectual labour, and it continued during many centuries to occupy that position. Without entering into anything resembling a literary history, which would be foreign to the objects of the present work, I shall endeavour briefly to estimate the manner in which it discharged its functions.

The first idea that is naturally suggested by the mention of the intellectual services of monasteries is the conservation of the writings of the Pagans. I have already observed, that among the early Christians there was a marked difference on the subject of their writings. The school which was represented by Tertullian regarded them with abhorrence, while the Platonists, who were represented by Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, not merely recognised with great cordiality their beauties, but even imagined that they could detect in them both the traces of an original Divine inspiration, and plagiarisms from the Jewish writings. While avoiding, for the most part, these extremes, St. Augustine, the great organiser of Western Christianity, treats the Pagan

writings with appreciative respect. He had himself ascribed his first conversion from a course of vice to the 'Hortensius' of Cicero, and his works are full of discriminating, and often very beautiful applications, of the old Roman literature. The attempt of Julian to prevent the Christians from teaching the classics, and the extreme resentment which that attempt elicited, show how highly the Christian leaders of that period valued this form of education; and it was naturally the more cherished on account of the contest. The influence of Neoplatonism, the baptism of multitudes of nominal Christians after Constantine, and the decline of zeal which necessarily accompanied prosperity, had all in different ways the same tendency. In Synesius we have the curious phenomenon of a bishop who, not content with proclaiming himself the admiring friend of the Pagan Hypatia, openly declared his complete disbelief in the resurrection of the body, and his firm adhesion to the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of souls.1 Had the ecclesiastical theory prevailed which gave such latitude even to the leaders of the Church, the course of Christianity would have been very different. A reactionary spirit, however, arose at Rome. The doctrine of exclusive salvation supplied its intellectual basis; the political and organising genius of the Roman ecclesiastics impelled them to reduce belief into a rigid form; the genius of St. Gregory guided the movement,2 and a series of

1 An interesting sketch of this very interesting prelate has, lately been written by M. Druon, Etude sur la Vie et les Euvres de Synésius (Paris, 1859).

2 Tradition has pronounced Gregory the Great to have been the destroyer of the Palatine library, and to have been especially zealous in burning the writings of Livy, because they described the achievements of the Pagan gods. For these charges, however (which I am sorry to find repeated by so eminent a writer as Dr. Draper), there is no real evidence, for they are not found in any writer earlier than the twelfth century. (See Bayle, Dict. art. Greg.) The extreme contempt of Gregory for Pagan literature is,