[34] “Charlemagne swept down like a whirlwind from the Alps at the call of Pope Hadrian, seized the King Desiderius in his capital, himself assumed the Lombard crown, and made northern Italy thenceforward an integral part of the Frankish empire. Proceeding to Rome at the head of his victorious army, the first of a long line of Teutonic kings who were to find her love more deadly than her hate, he was received by Hadrian with distinguished honors, and welcomed by the people as their leader and deliverer.”--Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_, chap. iv. [35] According to ancient Greek mythology, Sisyphus was, for his great wickedness, condemned in Hades to roll a great stone from the bottom to the top of a hill; but before he reached the top, the stone broke away and rolled down again, so that his task had to be begun anew, and thus it resulted in endless and tantalizing monotony. [36] Augustine--the theologian and bishop of Hippo--completed in the year 426 his book _De Civitate Dei_ (The City of God), which is regarded the greatest monument of his genius and learning. The chief aim of this book is to vindicate the claims of the Christian Church against those who asserted that such calamities as the capture of Rome by Alaric resulted from the new religion. On the contrary Augustine conceives of the Church as a “new order rising on the ruins of the old Roman empire:” a claim that might easily be used to defend the transference of despotic authority from the empire to the Church. [37] The conflict with the Saxons at Eresburg was precipitated by the ill-timed zeal of an Anglo-Saxon missionary named Lebuinus, who forced his way into their sacred assembly. “Arrayed in gorgeous robes and carrying a cross in his hand, the zealous missionary passed through the throng to an open enclosure, peculiarly sacred to the worshippers. The Saxons resented this intrusion as sacrilegious, but suppressed their indignation and for awhile listened to him.” He delivered a fiery and threatening address which so roused their wrath that they came near killing him. More moderate councils prevailed and the missionary was allowed to depart, but the church that Lebuinus had built for the salvation of these heathen, but which they could not be persuaded to use for Christian worship, was burned to the ground. This act of sacrilege was readily used to work on the feelings of Charlemagne. “Idolatry must perish” and Charlemagne was not reluctant to be the instrument of its punishment. In any view of the subject, however, it must be conceded that, human nature being what it is, the conflict between the two peoples, the Christian Franks and the heathen Saxons, was irrepressible, and one or the other was destined to prevail.--See Mombert, _Charles the Great_, book ii., chap. iii.