religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might be carried on. It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered. In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West, she preceded in time these newly formed monarchies. Amid the universal overthrow which the invaders had wrought she alone stood unmoved. The heresy which had so threatened her disappeared. On Goths, and Franks, and Saxons, and Alemans, she was free to exercise her divine power.[214] It is in that sixth century of tremendous revolutions that she laid the foundation of the future European society. Byzantium was descending to Mahomet while Rome was forecasting the Christian commonwealth of Charles the Great. In the Rome of Constantine, while the old civilisation had accepted her name, the old pagan principles had continually impeded her action. The civil rulers especially had harked back after the power of the heathen Pontifex Maximus; but in these new peoples who were not yet peoples, but only the unformed matter (_materia prima_) out of which peoples might be made, the Church was free to put her own ideal as a _form_ within them. They had the rudiments of institutions, which they trusted her to organise. They placed her bishops in their courts of justice, in their halls of legislation. The greatest of their conquerors in the hour of his supreme exaltation, which also was received from the Pope, was proud to be vested by her in the dalmatic of a deacon. Of this new world St. Gregory, in his desolated Rome, stood at the head.