s avoided contact with
the State, abstained from the responsibilities of office, and were even
reluctant to serve in the army. Cherishing their citizenship of a
kingdom not of this world, they despaired of an empire which seemed too
powerful to be resisted and too corrupt to be converted, whose
institutions, the work and the pride of untold centuries of paganism,
drew their sanctions from the gods whom the Christians accounted devils,
which plunged its hands from age to age in the blood of martyrs, and was
beyond the hope of regeneration and foredoomed to perish. They were so
much overawed as to imagine that the fall of the State would be the end
of the Church and of the world, and no man dreamed of the boundless
future of spiritual and social influence that awaited their religion
among the race of destroyers that were bringing the empire of Augustus
and of Constantine to humiliation and ruin. The duties of government
were less in their thoughts than the private virtues and duties of
subjects; and it was long before they became aware of the burden of
power in their faith. Down almost to the time of Chrysostom, they shrank
from contemplating the obligation to emancipate the slaves.

Although the doctrine of self-reliance and self-denial, which is the
foundation of political economy, was written as legibly in the New
Testament as in the _Wealth of Nations_, it was not recognised until our
age. Tertullian boasts of the passive obedience of the Christians.
Melito writes to a pagan Emperor as if he were incapable of giving an
unjust command; and in Christian times Optatus thought that whoever
presumed to find fault with his sovereign exalted himself almost to the
level of a god. But this political quietism was not universal. Origen,
the ablest writer of early times, spoke with approval of conspiring for
the destruction of tyranny.

After the fourth century the declarations against slavery are earnest
and continual. And in a theological but yet pregnant sense, divines of
the second century insist on liberty, and divines of the fourth century
on equality. There was one essential and inevitable transformation in
politics. Popular governments had existed, and also mixed and federal
governments, but there had been no limited government, no State the
circumference of whose authority had been defined by a force external to
its own. That was the great problem which philosophy had raised, and
which no statesmanship had been able to