As some winged seed is wafted from a fair garden into a dark, distant
forest, and there takes root and blossoms, so was the seed-germ of
Christianity caught by the wind of destiny, and carried from Palestine
to the heart of pagan Germany, where, strange to say, it found
congenial soil.
The story is a romantic one. A Christian boy in Asia Minor, while
straying on the shores of the Mediterranean, was captured by some
Goths, who took their fair-haired prize home to their own land, and
named him Ulfila.
The boy, with his heart all aflame for the religion in which he had
been nurtured, told his captors the story of Calvary--of Christ and His
gospel of peace and love--and lived to see the terrible sacrificial
altars replaced by the Cross.
The Goths had no alphabet, so Ulfila invented one, and then translated
the Bible into their rude speech. A part of this translation is now
preserved in Sweden, and is the earliest extant specimen of the Gothic
language. Even to the unlearned observer, this Gothic version of the
Lord's Prayer, written by Ulfila more than one thousand five hundred
years ago, bears such strong marks of kinship to the German and English
versions that it can be easily read by us to-day, and makes us realize
how much of the Teuton has mingled with our own life and speech.
The enormous vitality of the Teutons was evinced in their restless
desire to extend themselves. They were not comfortable neighbors. The
Franks made predatory incursions into Gaul, which they finally overran
and possessed; the Allemani, into Italy; the Saxons, in the same
manner, overran Britain; while the stalwart Goths addressed their blows
to the Roman Empire--the common foe of all--until 410 _Anno Domini_,
when, for a second time, Teuton feet trod the streets of Rome, this
time not chained to the chariot of a Marius, but conquerors. And when
the gates of the Eternal City yielded to the blows of Alaric, the Roman
Empire virtually ceased to exist.
So this rude people, which in the time of Julius Caesar was buried in
the forests of Central Europe, in six hundred years from his time
occupied all of Europe, and was beginning to lay the foundations of a
new empire upon the fragments of the old.
There is not time to tell how the newly Christianized and civilized
Goths were now in turn attacked by the Huns, a race vastly more fierce
and terrible than they had ever been, who swarmed down upon them
suddenly, like the locusts of Egypt, and under the leadership of Attila
swept everything before them; then, after leaving a track of blood and
ashes through Germany, disappearing again over the steppes of Russia,
from whence they had mysteriously come; a tremendous upturning force,
but bearing no relation to the future result more than the plough to
the future grain.
There had been no repose for Europe yet--incessant tribal changes; a
surging mass of humanity pouring from one land into another. The
troubled continent was a great, seething caldron, from which was to
emerge a new civilization. But soon after this final convulsion of the
Hunnish invasion the migrations ceased, and now, about the year 570,
the foundations of the present European divisions began to appear. In
Britain, subjugated by the Angles and Saxons, we see foreshadowed the
Anglo-Saxon England of to-day; in the country lying east and west of
the Rhine, France and Germany begin to be outlined; while the smaller
German states are distinctly visible, some of them with geographical
divisions almost the same as now. Modern Europe was beginning to
crystallize.