§ 3. THE NATIONS OF MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIANITY. 7
ting all this world ; but if, which Heaven avert, they finish by continuing to be its masters, peraclvcnture some day posterity will salute with the title of great princes those in whom we at this day can see nothing but enemies."
§ 3. The Nations of Mediccval Christianity. The Kelt, the Teuton, and tJie Slav.
The new national forces which now enter upon the arena of church-history may be divided into four groups :
1. The ROMANIC or LATIN nations of Southern Europe, in cluding the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and French. They are the natural descendants and heirs of the old Roman nation ality and Latin Christianity, yet mixed with the new Keltic and Germanic forces. Their languages are all derived from the Latin ; they inherited Roman laws and customs, and adhered to the Roman See as the centre of their ecclesiastical organization ; they carried Christianity to the advancing barbarians, and by their superior civilization gave laws to the conquerors. They still adhere, with their descendants in Central and South Ame rica, to the Roman Catholic Church.
2. The KELTIC race, embracing the Gauls, old Britons, the Picts and Scots, the Welsh and Irish with their numerous emi grants in all the large cities of Great Britain and the United States, appear in history several hundred years before Christ, as the first light wave of the vast Aryan migration from the mys terious bowels of Asia, which swept to the borders of the extreme West.1 The Gauls were conquered by Caesar, but afterwards
or KfArou, Celtce, Ta^drai, OalatcR or Galati, Galli, Gael. Some derive it from celt, a cover, shelter; others from celu (Lat. celo) to conceal. Hero dotus first mentions them, as dwelling in the extreme northwest of Europe. On these terms see Diefenbach, Celtica, Brandes, Kdten und Germanen, Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, the art. Galli in Pauly's Realencydopadie, and the introductions to the critical Commentaries on the Galatians by Wieseler and Lightfoot (and Lightfoot' s Excursus /.). The Galatians in Asia Minor, to whom Paul addressed his epistle, were a branch of the Keltic race, which either separated from the main current of the westward migration, or, being obstructed by the ocean, retraced their steps, and turned eastward. Wieseler (in his Com. and in several articles in the "Studien und Kritiken," and in the "Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte," 1877 No. 1) tries to make them Germans, a view first hinted at
8 MEDIAEVAL CHURCH HISTORY.
commingled with the Teutonic Francs, who founded the French monarchy. The Britons were likewise subdued Jby the Romans, and afterwards driven to Wales and Cornwall by the Anglo- Saxons. The Scotch in the highlands (Gaels) remained Keltic, while in the lowlands they mixed with Saxons and Normans.
The mental characteristics of the Kelts remain unchanged for two thousand years: quick wit, fluent speech, vivacity, sprightliness, impressibility, personal bravery and daring, loyalty to the chief or the clan, but also levity, fickleness, quarrelsomeness and incapacity for self-government. "They shook all empires, but founded none." The elder Cato says of them : " To two things are the Kelts most attent : to fighting (ars militaris), and to. adroitness of speech (argute loqui)" Csesar censures their love of levity and change. The apostle Paul complains of the same weakness. Thierry, their historian, well describes them thus : " Their prominent attributes are personal valor, in which they excel all nations; a frank, impetuous spirit open to every impression ; great intelligence, but joined with extreme mobility, deficient perseverance, restlessness under discipline and order, boastfulness and eternal discord, resulting from boundless vanity." Mommsen quotes this passage, and adds that the Kelts make good soldiers, but bad citizens; that the only order to which they submit is the military, because the severe general discipline relieves them of the heavy burden of individual self-control.1
Keltic Christianity was at first independent of Rome, and even antagonistic to it in certain subordinate rites ; but after the Saxon and Norman conquests, it was brought into conformity, and since the Reformation, the Irish have been more attached to the Roman Church than even the Latin races. The French for merly inclined likewise to a liberal Catholicism (called Gallicanism) ; but they sacrificed the Gallican liberties to the Ultramontanism of the Vatican Council. The Welsh and Scotch, on the con trary, with the exception of a portion of the Highlanders in the
by Luther. But the fickleness of the Galatian Christians is characteristic of the ancient Gauls and modern French.
1 Romische Oeschichte, Vol. I., p. 329, 5th ed., Berlin, 1868.