Pyrenees into Spain. They were not a single people, but many independent tribes; not an organized
army of a conqueror, but irregular hordes of wild warriors ruled by intrepid kings; not directed by
the ambition of one controlling genius, like Alexander or Caesar, but prompted by the irresistible
impulse of an historical instinct, and unconsciously bearing in their rear the future destinies of
Europe and America. They brought with them fire and sword, destruction and desolation, but also
life and vigor, respect for woman, sense of honor, love of liberty—noble instincts, which, being
purified and developed by Christianity, became the governing principles of a higher civilization
than that of Greece and Rome. The Christian monk Salvian, who lived in the midst of the barbarian
flood, in the middle of the fifth century, draws a most gloomy and appalling picture of the vices of
the orthodox Romans of his time, and does not hesitate to give preference to the heretical (Arian)
and heathen barbarians, "whose chastity purifies the deep stained with the Roman debauches." St.
Augustin (d. 430), who took a more sober and comprehensive view, intimates, in his great work
on the City of God, the possibility of the rise of a new and better civilization from the ruins of the
old Roman empire; and his pupil, Orosius, clearly expresses this hopeful view. "Men assert," he
says, "that the barbarians are enemies of the State. I reply that all the East thought the same of the
great Alexander; the Romans also seemed no better than the enemies of all society to the nations
afar off, whose repose they troubled. But the Greeks, you say, established empires; the Germans
overthrow them. Well, the Macedonians began by subduing the nations which afterwards they
civilized. The Germans are now upsetting all this world; but if, which Heaven avert, they, finish
by continuing to be its masters, peradventure some day posterity will salute with the title of great
princes those in whom we at this day can see nothing but enemies."
§ 3. The Nations of Mediaeval Christianity. The Kelt, the Teuton, and the Slav.
The new national forces which now enter upon the arena of church-history may be divided into
four groups:
- The Romanic or Latin nations of Southern Europe, including the Italians, Spaniards,
Portuguese and French. They are the natural descendants and heirs of the old Roman nationality
and Latin Christianity, yet mixed with the new Keltic and Germanic forces. Their languages are
all derived from the Latin; they inherited Roman laws and customs, and adhered to the Roman See
as the centre of their ecclesiastical organization; they carried Christianity to the advancing barbarians,
and by their superior civilization gave laws to the conquerors. They still adhere, with their
descendants in Central and South America, to the Roman Catholic Church. - The Keltic race, embracing the Gauls, old Britons, the Picts and Scots, the Welsh and
Irish with their numerous emigrants in all the large cities of Great Britain and the United States,
appear in history several hundred years before Christ, as the first light wave of the vast Aryan
migration from the mysterious bowels of Asia, which swept to the borders of the extreme West.^2
(^2) κελτοίorΚέλται, Celtae,Γαλάται, Galatae or Galati, Galli, Gael. Some derive it from celt, a cover, shelter; others
from celu (Lat. celo) to conceal. Herodotus first mentions them, as dwelling in the extreme northwest of Europe. On these terms
see Diefenbach, Celtica, Brandes,Kelten und Germanen, Thierry,Histoire des Gaulois, the art. Galli in Pauly’s Realencyclopädie,
and the introductions to the critical Commentaries on the Galatians by Wieseler and Lightfoot (and Lightfoot’s Excursus I).
The Galatians in Asia Minor, to whom Paul addressed his epistle, were a branch of the Keltic race, which either separated from
the main current of the westward migration, or, being obstructed by the ocean, retraced their steps, and turned eastward. Wieseler