and respect in presents to each order-nor let them easily give trouble to their governors, but let them signify their desires by the ministers, that is, the deacons, with whom they may be more free. For neither may we have access to Almighty God, but through Christ; in like manner let the laity make known their desires to the bishop by a deacon, and do as he directs."

The people at large, as may easily be imagined, from this account of their clergy, were sunk into an ignorant superstition, wholly inconsistent with the pure worship of the one only living and true God, through Jesus Christ. This, added to a union of many customs and ceremonies, derived from the Heathen worship, with those of the Gospel, being now generally permitted in the Churches to answer particular purposes, some good and many of a very bad complexion, had drawn the common people off from the simplicity of the Gospel. They were left little more than mere tools of the clergy, of whose power and authority they were now taught to form the most extravagant ideas, from the models they had been used to, in the sacerdotal orders of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, during the establishment of the Jewish œconomy, or Pagan superstition. In Spain, under the domination of the Visigoths, the clergy claimed and actually possessed a power superior to that of the monarch. They drew all causes, both civil and ecclesiastical, within their cognizance, and extended their jurisdiction to the utmost limits, so that the bishops, who became the universal judges, were the terror of the people; and by them the important affairs of the kingdom were directed. Of course, revolutions and crimes became the order of the day: and the power of the clergy over the kings of Spain is best known by the number of assassinations committed in this century.

These liberties, on the part of the Christian bishops, were not neglected by the emperors and the favourers of the ancient Polytheism. They also had their views to accomplish, and their particular gratifications aud pleasures to consult. The feasts of Saturn and Pan-the combats of the Gladiators, and other Paganish institutions, in honour of their respective deities, were anxiously revived in every part of the empire. Men of rank and influence were to be found throughout the kingdom, uniting with the vulgar of every country and province, in the idolatrous worship of their ancestors.

The Church, indeed before this, had been greatly distressed and divided by some heretical doctrines, and particularly that of Arius, but the Catholics had, before this century, maintained the true doctrines of the Gospel and the spirit of divine worship uncontaminated, and multitudes of its sincere professors had sealed the truth with their blood, which had become the seed of the Church.

To form a proper idea of the enormity of the Christian idolatry, we ought to attend to the opinion of the real Christians of the times, at the commencement of this apostasy. The council of Illiberis, held in Spain, before the reign of Constantine, in the 36th canon, page 50, expressly provided against pictures in a Church, decreeing "that no pictures ought to be in Churches; nor any thing that is worshipped and adored should be painted on the walls."*

The first instance that we meet with, well authenticated, of such practices, is from Epiphanius, who in his epistle translated by St. Hierom, in his 2d. vol. p. 161,

1 Cave's Prim. Christ. 147. Oper. Hierom, vol. 2d. 161.

where he says "coming to Anablatha, a village in Palestine, and going into the Church to pray, I espied a curtain hanging over the door, whereon was painted the image of Christ or of some saint, which when I looked upon and saw the image of a man hanging up in the Church, contrary to the authority of the Holy Scriptures, I presently rent it, and advised the guardians of the Church rather to make use of it as a winding sheet for some poor man's burial."*

Augustine says, "we set apart no temples, no priests, nor divine services, nor sacrifices to Martyrs, because they are not God; but the same who is theirs is our God.†

The worship of angels was publickly and solemnly condemned by the whole Laodicean council. "It is not lawful," say they, in the 35th canon, "for Christians to leave the Church of God, to go and invocate angels, and to make prohibited assemblies. If therefore any one shall be found devoting himself to this private idolatry, (for at first they did not dare to do it in the Church) let him be accursed, for as much as he has forsaken the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and has delivered himself up to idolatry."

During the fifth century "Christianity had been embraced by almost all the Barbarians, who had established their kingdoms on the ruins of the western empire. It introduced an important change in their moral and political condition. They received, at the same time, the use of letters, so essential to religion-whose doctrines are contained in a sacred book; and while they studied the divine truth, their minds were insensibly enlarged by the distant view of the history of nature, of the arts, and of

* Cave, ibid. 148. Ibid. 104.-Aug. de Civ. Dic. Let. 15. cap. 27.

society."* But in the latter part of this century the Barbarian emperors having been drawn over to the Arian party, greatly increased the sufferings and divisions of the Church of Christ, and having forgotten every principle of humanity, as well as Christian charity, they seemed to think they did God service by torturing and murdering his chosen servants with new and unheard of cruelties. Mr. Gibbon, who is not averse from undervaluing the sufferings of the Christian martyrs, has been obliged to bear his testimony to their barbarous persecutions.

"The fierce and formidable Visigoths (had previously and) universally adopted the religion of the Romans, with whom they maintained a perpetual intercourse of war, of friendship, or of conquest. The Romans, in their long and victorious march from the Danube to the Atlantic ocean, converted their allies-they educated the rising generation; and the devotion that reigned in the camp of Alaric, or the court of Thoulouse, might edify or disgrace the palaces of Rome and Constantinople. During this same period, (and soon after) Christianity was embraced by almost all the Barbarians who established their kingdoms on the ruin of the western empire; the Burgundians in Gaul, the Suevi in Spain, the Vandals in Africa, the Ostrogoths in Panonia, and the various bands of mercenaries that raised Odoacer to the throne of Italy. The Franks and Saxons still persevered in the errors of Paganism; but the Franks obtained the monarchy of Gaul by their submission to the example of Clovis; and the Saxon conquerors of Britain were reclaimed from their savage superstition by the missionaries of Rome. These Barbarian proselytes displayed an

* Gibbon, 6 vol. 272–275.

Rr

ardent and successful zeal for the propagation of the faith. The Merovingian kings and their successors, Charlemagne and the Otho's, extended, by their laws and victories, the dominion of the cross. England produced the apostle of Germany, and the evangelic light was gradually diffused from the neighbourhood of the Rhine to the nations of the Elbe, the Vistula, and the Baltic."*

But it was not long before the vigilant enemy of man's happiness began to sow tares among the wheat. The advocates of Arius beset the throne, and the purple was no proof against the arts and industry of these sectaries of the Church. Under Genseric and his successors, in this century," the citizens who had been educated in the luxury of the Roman provinces, were delivered with exquisite cruelty to the Moors of the desert. A venerable train of bishops, presbyters, and deacons, with a faithful crowd of four thousand and ninety-six persons, whose guilt is not precisely ascertained, were torn from their native homes, by the command of Hunneric. During the night they were confined like a herd of cattle amidst their own ordure; during the day they pursued their march over the burning sands, and if they fainted, under the heat and fatigue, they were goaded or dragged along till they expired in the hands of their tormentors. Through the veil of fiction and declamation, we may clearly perceive that the Catholics, more especially under the reign of Hunneric, endured the most cruel and ignominious treatment. Respectable citizens, noble matrons, and consecrated virgins were stripped naked, and raised in the air by pullies, with a weight suspended at their feet. In this painful attitude their naked bodies were torn by scourges, or burnt, in the most tender parts, with

* Gibbon, 6 vol. 271.