This meant disintegration into helpless fragments, and this meant the end of a Frankish kingdom, unless some power should arise great enough to compel the crumbling state to become homogeneous.

It was a Romanized-Frankish family dwelling in the Valley of the Rhine which saved the kingdom of Clovis from this fate.  France had already fallen apart into an eastern and a western kingdom, known respectively as Austrasia and Neustria.  A certain Duke of Austrasia, known as Pepin the Elder, was the forerunner of the Carlovingian line of kings.  With him the centralizing force began to work with saving power.  The one end kept in view was the restoration of the power of kingship—­the strengthening of the power at the centre.  To this end, from generation to generation, these early Pepins steadily moved.  In 687 Pepin the Younger, grandson of the Elder, by a victory at Testry over Neustria, brought together these two sundered divisions under himself, with the new title Duke of the Franks.  The Pepins had already succeeded in making the office of Maire du Palais hereditary in their family, and in the year A.D. 732, Charles, son and successor of Pepin the Younger, made himself forever the hero not of France alone, but of Christendom, by driving the Saracen invasion back over the Pyrenees, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Pepin the Short, who seized the Merovingian crown itself; this remarkable family, the appointed channel for the centralizing forces, reaching its climax in his son Charlemagne; creator of a Holy Roman Empire.

There had appeared an enemy to the true faith more to be feared than paganism.

Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which to-day rules one-third of the human family.  Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now (A.D. 600) Mahomet believed himself divinely appointed to drive out of Arabia the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster).

Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes.  Kings, emperors, popes, and bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths; and while many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were fiercely righting over the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of the Virgin Mother, and the Church was shaken to its foundation by furious factions.

In this hour of weakness the Persians (A.D. 590) had conquered Asia Minor.  Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of laughter.  Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle had interposed!  The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open her abysses to swallow them up.  There was consternation and doubt in Christendom.