is the stage of universal toleration which was made
possible by polytheism. A second stage soon follows. The various
religions of the Empire overflow one another's frontier-lines and a
synthesis begins, leading to the Stoic idea of the universal truth
expressed in many forms. But the popular mind was unable to rise to this
high conception, and the third stage begins towards the end of the first
century in the formal adoption of the worship of the Emperor as the
religious expression of the unity of the Empire. It was the opposition
of the Christian Church that did most to bring to naught this effort to
give a religious foundation to the unity of the Empire, and the attempt
of Constantine and Theodosius to make Christianity an Imperial religion
came too late to save the Empire from disintegration.

For the unity of the Christian Church had been undermined. When
Christianity shook itself free from the shackles of Jewish nationalism,
it came under the influence of Greek thought. The theology and language
of the early Church were Greek. Even in Rome the Church was for at least
two centuries "a Greek colony." Hence the growth of Christianity was
slow in those western parts of the Empire that had not come under the
influence of Greek culture--Gaul, Britain, Spain, North Africa. Latin
Christianity found its centre in North Africa, where Roman culture had
imposed itself on the hard, cruel Carthaginian world. It is Carthage,
not Athens, that gives to Tertullian his harsh intolerance and to St
Augustine his stern determinism. So the way was prepared for what I
regard as the supreme tragedy of history--the falling apart of Eastern
and Western Christianity. Then, in the West, the unity of the Church is
broken by the conversion of the Teutonic peoples to Arianism, so that
the contest between the dying Empire in the West and the tribes pressing
on its frontiers is embittered by religious antagonism. The sword of
Clovis secured the victory of orthodoxy, but at what a cost!

When the storm subsides, there emerges the august conception of the Holy
Roman Empire. For the noblest expression of the ideal of a universal
Christian Empire, read Dante's _De Monarchia_. The history of the Holy
Roman Empire is too large a subject to enter upon. It is important to
remember that the struggles between the Popes and the Emperors that fill
so large a space of mediaeval history were not struggles between Church
and State. Western Europe was conceived of