It has been the fashion to decry the value of the check that the Church put on the barbarous tribes in the early part of the Christian era.[388] Up to the very door of the Church there was, it is true, slaughter—there it stopped. Had it not been for the Church upholding what it did of civilization and humanity, it is difficult to say what would have been the outcome of the hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gephids, Longobards, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons who, at one time or another, fell upon Rome. But from the third century these invaders in their very triumph came face to face with a moral force that checked them as no army could, softened their manners, and uniting their rude strength with the last remains of the glory of Rome, gave to the world the civilized nations that now practically control both hemispheres. Of the first missionary efforts little is known. Jesus himself had said, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations.... Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,”[389] and was indeed himself the first missionary of the new faith. Of his immediate followers only three undertook missionary work. After the death of Jesus, the Apostles scattered over the whole world. “Thomas,” says Eusebius, “received Parthia as his alloted region; Andrew received Scythia, and John, Asia.... Peter appears to have preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia ... and Paul spread the Gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum.”[390] From another source we are told that Matthew went into Æthiopia, but in the following century there is little light as to who were the missionaries; but that they were everywhere successful is shown by the reports of the Roman governors to the emperors. Undisputed claims of Tertullian and Justin also show that the work of conversion, despite the proscriptions, was going on rapidly enough. Ulfilas, “the Apostle of the Goths,” translated the Bible into their language in 325; Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli in 370, made his cathedral the centre of missionary work. Chrysostom trained people in the Gothic language and in missionary work and sent them among the Goths according to Theodoretius.[391] It was harder work in the West but it was more lasting. From Berins, an islet off the roadstead of Toulon where, in 410 A.D., a Roman patrician, Honoratus, had founded a monastic home, there were sent bishops to Arles, Avignon, Lyons, Troyes, Metz, and Nice, and many other places in southern and western Gaul, all to become the centres of missionary work.[392]