Читать книгу The Church and the Barbarians - William Holden Hutton - Страница 9

A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul. There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians.

[Sidenote: Roman Gaul.]

Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died in Southern Gaul. Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian. As the state organised so did the Church. Gaul had seventeen provincial governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them bishops for each great city. On the Roman empire and the Christian Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm.