of Stock--which Uprauda he had latinized into Justinus. The Amal
knew well how he had entered the Emperor's guard; how he had
intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and
conduct) to his general's commission; and now, by a crowning act of
roguery, to the Empire. He had known too, most probably, the man's
vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making
herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her
already willing husband to persecute. And this man he saw ready to
convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against
the Arians. He was dangerous enough as a villain, doubly dangerous
as a bigot also.

We must remember next what the Greek Church was then; a chaos of
intrigue, villainy, slander, and wild fury, tearing to pieces itself
and the whole Empire by religious feuds, in which the doctrine in
question becomes invisible amid the passions and crimes of the
disputants, while the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks,
who swarm out of their dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched
battles with each other. The ecclesiastical history of the fifth
century in the Eastern Empire is one, which not even the genius of a
Gibbon or a Milman can make interesting, or even intelligible.

Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had
seen actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the
Eutychian Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his
foster father the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman
forcibly puts it) 'flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use
of his legs by standing sixteen years upon a column.' Recollect that
Dietrich and his Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his
throne; and then understand in what a school he had learnt his great