re God worked by Pilate as by Peter.
Therefore the mediaeval poet is eager to show that Roman government was
simply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point
of the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government
was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God
among the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving a
colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen repose
in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort of
eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly
remembered through the first half of English history; for it is the
whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.

The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense
remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be
conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began it
largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the
most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly
existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But
there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still
less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change was
passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and
equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at
the expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp
that the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was
slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of
the Empire and by the strengthening of the Church.

Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on
the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the
servile or "useful" arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to
cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce the
cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She
was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than
the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan
simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much
less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history
of England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the
Great; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the R