It will be noticed that none of the ecclesiastical boundaries which we have mentioned run in an easterly direction. Instead of coinciding with the language frontier, they cross it everywhere, uniting in the same religious community "Walas" and "Dietschen," Celts and Germans. For eight centuries the Church, which was at the time the supreme moral influence, unconsciously devoted all its energy to bringing together the two groups of population. They met in the same churches, they prayed before the same shrines, they joined in the same pilgrimages, they studied and meditated within the walls of the same monasteries. No wonder if such intercourse succeeded finally in uniting those whom nature had so strongly separated, and in creating in Belgium a new type of civilization neither Celtic nor Frankish, neither romanized nor germanized, but combining some of the strongest qualities of both races and well prepared to act as a kind of intellectual, moral and artistic link between them. This rule suffers only one exception. When the progress of Christianity permitted the foundation of a new bishopric at Utrecht, this religious metropolis was not subjected to any Romanic influence. It remained purely Germanic in character, and, already at this early stage of the history of the Netherlands, gave a distinct character to their extreme northern districts, which reasserted itself so strongly at the time of the Reformation. The Merovingian kings gave a kind of sanction to this gradual separation of the Salian Franks, established in Northern Belgium, from the bulk of the Germanic tribes. It is significant that the limit which for a time separated their kingdom into Neustria in the west and Austrasia in the east, and which followed, in Eastern Gaul, the language frontier, assumed another course in Belgium, and, instead of running from east to west, as might have been expected, ran north and south along the frontier separating the bishopric of Liege from that of Cambrai, bringing Walas and Franks together on both sides of the line. Another proof of the romanizing influence of the Church may be found in the fact that the Franks established in Belgium forgot their tribal affinities. While in the seventh century Ripuarians, Alamans and Thuringians constituted themselves into so many distinct duchies, no attempt was ever made to found a Salian duchy in Northern Belgium. The very name of Franks ceased to be applied to the Walas' neighbours, and it is as "Dietschen," or "Thiois," that they were known through the Middle Ages.