For now one hundred years had most men of the cities accepted the Faith. And though amid the dwindling soldiery the gods of the pagans lingered, and though the auxiliaries, barbaric like the rest, followed, each group of them, the customs of the tribe whence it sprang, and for the most part did not yet know Christ, yet as they marched through that land they were marching through Christian land, and by this time the feasts of repose and the songs they heard and answered, and the rites of marriage when they would wed into the folk about them, and the rule whereby alone their children could succeed to their land when they had done with arms, all these things were Christian. Stronger than the cities, much more real than the empty name of Cæsar, was the Church; and in each city a great priest, ordering the wealth of the clergy, administrating their wide farms and their thousand slaves, speaking with ancient authority and remembering Rome, ruled, and was a bishop. Of these the greatest in that time was Remigius, whom we call St. Remi, the lord in Rheims and the father of Champagne. This man, whose judgment and whose word weighed much more with Gaul of the north than many soldiers, had seen the young man Clovis thus conquering to the east and to the west, passing through the gates of the cities and breaking in battle the Germans of the Rhine, so that from the day of his victory no more hordes came out from the forests, where there are no towns, into the plains of Gaul. To the south, in the name of Rome, there governed men who hated the Catholic name and who had a pride in hating it, because in the days when they had risen to power and to be kings (each over his body of garrisons, in the name of the emperor) the emperor’s court itself had accepted heresy, and the Catholic millions were despised. Here, in the north, fate still hung doubtful who would seize power, and, if he seized it, whether he should stand with the bishops of the Church or against them like the southern lords.