beauty:

'If a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical
dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the
ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof.'

Few evolutions in history, indeed, can be more clearly traced than the
successive stages through which Rome, by a gradual and very natural
process, obtained the primacy of Christendom. In the condition of
Europe, again, at the time of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the
invasion, the triumph, and the rapid conversion of the barbarians, the
chief causes of the materialising transformation which Christian ideas
underwent appeared abundantly evident; and it became clear to me that
some such transformation was inevitable, and essential to their enduring
influence. Was it possible, I asked myself, that in ages of anarchy and
convulsion, any religion resembling Protestant Christianity could have
prevailed among great masses of wild and ignorant barbarians, with all
the associations and mental habits of idolaters, at a time when neither
rag paper nor printing was invented, and when a wide diffusion of the
Bible was absolutely impossible? But such methods of reasoning could not
stop there. I was naturally led to consider how different are the
measures of probability, the predispositions toward the miraculous, the
canons of evidence and proof, the standards and ideals of morals in
different ages, and how largely these differences affect the whole
question of evidence. I began to realise the existence of climates of
opinion; to observe how particular forms of belief naturally grow and
flourish in certain stages of intellectual development, and fade when
these conditions have changed; how much that is called apostasy and
imposture is in reality anachronism, the survival in one age of forms of
belief that were the appropriate product of an earlier one.

A writer of extraordinary brilliancy and power was at this time
exercising a great influence either of attraction or repulsion on all
serious students of history. Those who are old enough to remember the
appearance of the first volume of Buckle's 'History,' in 1857, and of
the second volume, in 1861, will remember also how rapidly and how
passionately it divided opinion. It was in truth a book in which
extraordinary merits were balanced by extraordinary defects. On the
special subject of the growth of religions, which most interested me,
it was peculiarly deficie