Page:Schools of Charles the Great.djvu/47

 SALVIAN. 23 country of his birth ; the aspect of the times cast a gloom INTROD. over his whole nature. He believed that it was but the, " His beginning of the end the end of the Eoman polity, the despair Eoman civilisation, the Eoman learning ; and he looked upon such a sequel as nothing more than a long-merited retribution for the wanton abuse of power and almost universal demorali- sation that characterised his age. Like Augustine in his De Civitate Dei, like Orosius in his History, the presbyter of Marseilles, in his turn, put forth the De Gubematione TheDe Dei, to point the moral of contemporaneous history, ' a'nd justify the ways of God to man.' It was in the same year that the battle of Chalons was fought that Salvian is said to have commenced his treatise, and in its turbid eloquence and abrupt transitions we seem to see the reflex of the tumult around. ' Ye complain, Eomans,' is his cry, * because the barbarian crushes you ; but ye complain without right, for ye merit all your woes. 5 even better.' 1 Christianity itself seemed to him powerless to reform a state of society thus utterly corrupt; it was in the barbaric element that his hopes of a regenerated and reinvigorated Europe really centered. Among the Latin races he could discern nothing but corruption, vice, and crime : the hand of authority stretched out only to < oppress the riches of the wealthy squandered in sensual and debasing pleasures the needy, despairing of justice against the employer and of honest recompense of labour, betaking themselves to the recesses of the forest and the mountain to assume the career of the brigand. While in the midst of this widespread, this almost universal, lawlessness and de- moralisation, when the Vandal was triumphing in Africa and the Frank was marshalling his forces for a final descent upon Gaul, the denizen of the great cities, reckless of the morrow, shouted, and applauded in the theatre and the circus inter suoruin supplicia ridebat.* ' Ye ask for public games, ye  De Gub. Dei, iv 12 ; Migne, liii 84 : ' TJbi eublimior est praerogativa, major est culpa,' says Salvian. 5 Ibid, vi 12 ; Migne, liii 123.
 * These barbarians,' he fiercely adds, ' are as good as you, and