ead and gain proselytes,
still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after
the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world.
The Roman empire--that greatest monument of human power, as Dean
Church has called it--began the fusion of races into one vast
political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on
the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea;
it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment
of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political
history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that
changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world--the
rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions.
First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had
levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the
conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal
spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the
temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia. In Asia the
victorious creed of Mohammed imposed upon immense multitudes a
religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the
dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was
torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire
was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered
together all races of the West under the common denomination of
Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the
primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there
were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes
contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this
strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the
formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we
may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when
the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when
the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that
may be called national. In these countries the subdivisions according
to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the
sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The
great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into
two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has
gradu