life! how many hast thou deceived, seduced, and blinded! Thou fliest and art nothing; thou appearest and art but a shade; thou risest and art but a vapor; thou fliest every day, and every day thou comest; thou fliest in coming, and comest in flying, the same at the point of departure, different at the end; sweet to the foolish, bitter to the wise. Those who love thee know thee not, and those only know thee who despise thee. What art thou, then, O human life? Thou art the way of mortals, and not their life. Thou beginnest in sin and endest in death. Thou art then the way of life and not life itself. Thou art only a road, and an unequal road, long for some, short for others; wide for these, narrow for those; joyous for some, sad for others, but for all equally rapid and without return. It is necessary, then, O miserable human life! to fathom thee, to question thee, but not to trust in thee. We must traverse thee without dwelling in thee-no one dwells upon a great road; we but march over it, to reach the country beyond.""

Several of the disciples of Columbanus labored in eastern Helvetia and Rhætia.

SIGISBERT separated from him at the foot of the St. Gothard, crossed eastward over the Oberalp to the source of the Rhine, and laid the foundation of the monastery of Dissentis in the Grisons, which lasts to this day.

ST. GALL (Gallus), the most celebrated of the pupils of Columbanus, remained in Switzerland, and became the father of the monastery and city called after him, on the banks of the river Steinach. He declined the bishopric of Constanz. His double struggle against the forces of nature and the gods of heathenism has been embellished with marvelous traits by the legendary poetry of the middle ages.' When he died, ninety-five

1 Montalembert, II. 436.

2 See the anonymous Vita S. Galli in Pertz, Monumenta, II. 123, and in the Acta Sanct., Tom. VII. Octobris. Also Greith, Geschichte der altirischen Kirche.. als Einleitung in die Gesch. des Stifts St. Gallen (1857), the chapter on Gallus, pp. 333 sqq.

years old, A. D. 640, the whole surrounding country of the Allemanni was nominally christianized. The monastery of St. Gall became one of the most celebrated schools of learning in Switzerland and Germany, where Irish and other missionaries learned German and prepared themselves for evangelistic work in Switzerland and Southern Germany. There Notker Balbulus, the abbot (died 912), gave a lasting impulse to sacred poetry and music, as the inventor or chief promoter of the mediaval Laudes or Prosa, among which the famous "Media vita in morte sumus" still repeats in various tongues its solemn funeral warning throughout Christendom.

FRIDOLD OF FRIDOLIN, who probably came from Scotland, preached the gospel to the Allemanni in South Germany. But his life is involved in great obscurity, and assigned by some to the time of Clovis I. (481-511), by others more probably to that of Clovis II. (638-656).

KILIAN OF KYLLINA, of a noble Irish family, is said to have been the apostle of Franconia and the first bishop of Würzburg in the seventh century.

§ 24. German Missionaries before Boniface.

England derived its Anglo-Saxon population from Germany in the fifth century, and in return gave to Germany in the eighth century the Christian religion with a strong infusion of popery. Germany afterwards shook off the yoke of popery, and gave to England the Protestant Reformation. In the seventeenth century, England produced Deism, which was the first act of modern unbelief, and the forerunner of German Rationalism. The revival of evangelical theology and religion which followed in both countries, established new points of contact between these cognate races, which meet again on common ground in the Western hemisphere to commingle in the American nationality.

The conversion of Germany to Christianity and to Romanism was, like that of England, the slow work of several centuries. It was accomplished by missionaries of different nationalities,

French, Scotch-Irish, English, and Greek. It began at the close of the second century, when Irenæus spoke of Christian congregations in the two Germanies, i. e. Germania prima and secunda, on the upper and lower Rhine; and it was substantially completed in the age of Charlemagne in the eighth century. But nearly the entire North-Eastern part of Germany, which was inhabited mostly by Slavonic tribes, remained heathen till the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

We must distinguish especially three stages: 1) the preparatory labors of Italian, French, and Scotch-Irish missionaries; 2) the consolidating romanizing work of Boniface of England and his successors; 3) the forcible military conversion of the Saxons under Charlemagne. The fourth and last missionary stage, the conversion of the Prussians and Slavonic races in North-Eastern Germany, belongs to the next period.

The light of Christianity came to Germany first from the Roman empire in the Roman colonies on the Rhine. At the council of Arles in 314, there was a bishop Maternus of Cologne with his deacon, Macrinus, and a bishop of Treves by the name of Agröcius.

In the fifth century the mysterious SEVERINUS from the East appeared among the savages on the banks of the Danube in Bavaria as an angel of mercy, walking bare-footed in mid-winter, redeeming prisoners of war, bringing food and clothing with the comfort of the Gospel to the poor and unfortunate, and won by his self-denying labors universal esteem. French monks and hermits left traces of their work at St. Goar, St. Elig, Wulfach, and other places on the charming banks of the Rhine. The efficient labors of COLUMBANUS and his Irish companions and pupils extended from the Vosges to South Germany and Eastern Switzerland. WILLEBRORD, an Anglo-Saxon, brought up in an Irish convent, left with twelve brethren for Holland (690), became the Apostle of the Friesians, and was consecrated

1 αἱ ἐν ταῖς Γερμανίαις ἱδρυμέναι ἐκκλησίαι. Adv. hær. I. 10, 2.

by the Pope the first bishop of Utrecht (Trajectum), under the name of Clemens. He developed an extensive activity of nearly fifty years till his death (739).

When Boniface arrived in Germany he found nearly in all parts which he visited, especially in Bavaria and Thuringia, missionaries and bishops independent of Rome, and his object was fully as much to romanize this earlier Christianity as to convert the heathen. He transferred the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon mission of Rome and the older Keltic Christianity of Patrick and Columba and their successors from England to German soil, and repeated the role of Augustin of Canterbury. The old Easter controversy disappears after Columbanus, and the chief objects of dispute were freedom from popery and clerical marriage. In both respects, Boniface succeeded, after a hard struggle, in romanizing Germany.

The leaders of the opposition to Rome and to Bonifacius. among his predecessors and contemporaries were ADELBERT and CLEMENS. We know them only from the letters of Boniface, which represent them in a very unfavorable light. Adelbert, or Aldebert (Eldebert), was a Gaul by nation,. and perhaps bishop of Soissons; at all events he labored on the French side of the Rhine, had received épiscopal ordination, and enjoyed great popularity from his preaching, being regarded as an apostle, a patron, and a worker of miracles. According to Boniface, he was a second Simon Magus, or immoral impostor, who deceived the people by false miracles and relics, claimed equal rank with the apostles, set up crosses and oratories in the fields, consecrated buildings in his own name, led women astray, and boasted to have relics better than those of Rome; and brought to him by an angel from the ends of the earth. Clemens was a Scotchman (Irishman), and labored in East Franconia. He opposed ecclesiastical traditions and clerical celibacy, and had two sons. He held marriage with a brother's widow to be valid, and had peculiar views of divine predestination and Christ's descent into Hades. Aldebert and Clemens were condemned without a

hearing, and excommunicated as heretics and seducers of the people, by a provincial Synod of Soissons, A. D. 744, and again in a Synod of Rome, 745, by Pope Zacharias, who confirmed the decision of Boniface. Aldebert was at last imprisoned in the monastery of Fulda, and killed by shepherds after escaping from prison. Clemens disappeared.1

§ 25. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany.

I. BONIFACIUS: Epistolæ et Sermones, first ed. by Serrarius, Mogunt. 1605, then by Würdtwein, 1790, by Giles, 1842, and in Migne's Patrol. Tom. 89, pp. 593-801 (together with Vitæ, etc.). JAFFE: Monumenta Moguntina. Berol. 1866.

II. Biographies of Bonifacius. The oldest by WILLIBALD, his pupil

and companion (in Pertz, Monum. II. 33, and in Migne, l. c. p. 603); by ОTHLO, a German Benedictine monk of the eleventh cent. (in Migne, p. 634); LETZNER (1602); LÖFFLER (1812); SEITERS (1845); Cox (1853); J. P. MÜLLER (1870); HOPE (1872); AUG. WERNER Bonifacius und die Romanisirung von Mitteleuropa. Leipz., 1875; PFAHLER(Regensb. 1880); OTTO FISCHER (Leipz. 1881); Ebrard: Bonif. der Zerstörer des columbanischen Kirchenthums auf dem Festlande (Gütersloh, 1882; against Fischer and very unjust to B.; see against it ZÖPFFEL in the" Theol. Lit. Zeitg," 1882, No. 22). Cf. the respective sections in NEANDER, GFRÖRER, RETTBERG (II. 307 sqq.)

On the councils of Bonif. see HEFELE: Conciliengeschichte, III. 458. BONIFACE OF WINFRIED2 surpassed all his predecessors on the German mission-field by the extent and result of his labors, and acquired the name of the Apostle of Germany. He was born about 680 from a noble family at Kirton in Wessex, the last stronghold of paganism among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. He was brought up in the convent of Nutsal near Winchester, and ordained priest at the age of thirty. He felt it his duty to christianize those countries from which his Anglo-Saxon

1 Comp. besides the Letters of Boniface, the works of Neander, Rettberg, Ebrard, Werner and Fischer, quoted below.

2 One that wins peace. His Latin name Bonifacius, Benefactor, was probably his monastic name, or given to him by the Pope on his second visit to Rome, 723.