defended clerical marriage).^121 He encountered from them a most determined opposition, especially
in Bavaria. In connection with his servile Romanism is his pedantic legalism and ceremonialism.
His epistles and sermons show a considerable knowledge of the Bible, but also a contracted legalistic
spirit. He has much to say about matters of outward conformity to Roman authority and usages and
about small questions of casuistry, such as whether it was right to eat horse flesh, rabbits, storks,
meat offered to idols, to marry a widow after standing god-father to her son, how often the sign of
the cross should be made in preaching. In his strength and his weakness, his loyalty, to Rome, and
in the importance of the work he accomplished, he resembled Augustin, the Roman apostle of his
Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
Boniface succeeded by indomitable perseverance, and his work survived him. This must
be his vindication. In judging of him we should remember that the controversy between him and
his French and Scotch-Irish opponents was not a controversy between Catholicism and evangelical
Protestantism (which was not yet born), but between organized Catholicism or Romanism and
independent Catholicism. Mediaeval Christianity was very weak, and required for its
self-preservation a strong central power and legal discipline. It is doubtful whether in the barbarous
condition of those times, and amid the commotions of almost constant civil wars, the independent
and scattered labors of the anti-Roman missionaries could have survived as well and made as strong
an impression upon the German nation as a consolidated Christianity with a common centre of
unity, and authority.
Roman unity was better than undisciplined independency, but it was itself only a preparatory
school for the self-governing freedom of manhood.
After Boniface had nearly completed his work, a political revolution took place in France
which gave it outward support. Pepin, the major domus of the corrupt Merovingian dynasty,
overthrew it with the aid of Pope Zacharias, who for his conquest of the troublesome Lombards
rewarded him with the royal crown of France (753). Fifty years afterwards this political alliance
of France and Germany with the Italian papacy was completed by Charlemagne and Leo III., and
lasted for many centuries. Rome had the enchantment of distance, the prestige of power and culture,
and promised to furnish the strongest support to new and weak churches. Rome was also the
connecting link between mediaeval and ancient civilization, and transmitted to the barbarian races
the treasures of classical literature which in due time led to the revival of letters and to the Protestant
Reformation.
§ 26. The Pupils of Boniface. Willibald, Gregory of Utrecht, Sturm of Fulda.
Boniface left behind him a number of devoted disciples who carried on his work.
Among these we mention St. Willibald, the first bishop of Eichstädt. He was born about
a.d. 700 from a noble Anglo-Saxon family and a near relative of Boniface. In his early manhood
he made a pilgrimage to Rome and to the Holy Land as far as Damascus, spent several years among
(^121) The description he gives of their immorality, must be taken with considerable deduction. In Ep. 49 to Pope Zacharias
(a. d.742) in Migne, l.c., p. 745, he speaks of deacons, priests and bishops hostile to Rome, as being guilty of habitual drunkenness,
concubinage, and even polygamy. I will only quote what he says of the bishops: "Et inveniuntur quidem inter eos episcopi, qui,
licet dicant se fornicarios vel adulteros non esse, sed sunt ebriosi, et injuriosi, vel venatores, et qui pugnant in exercitu armati,
et effundunt propria manu sanguinem hominum, sive paganorum, sive Christianorum."