s of the Christian society. In the opinion of Dobschuetz
the moral condition of the Church in the second century was much higher
than among St. Paul's converts in the first. The paucity of references
to sins of the flesh, and to fraud, is to be accounted for by the actual
rarity of such offences. For a short time, then, the artificial
selection effected by the persecutions kept the Church pure; and from
the happy pictures which we can reconstruct of this period we can judge
what a really Christian society would be like.

The history of institutional Catholicism must be approached from a
different side. Troeltsch argues with much cogency that the Catholic
Church must be regarded rather as the last creative achievement of
classical antiquity than as the beginning of the Middle Ages. Its growth
belongs mainly to the political history of Europe; the strictly
religious element in it is quite subordinate. There is, as Modernist
critics have seen, a real break between the Palestinian Gospel and the
elaborate mystery-religion, with its graded hierarchy, its Roman
organisation, its Hellenistic speculative theology, which achieved the
conquest of the Empire in the fourth century. The Church, as Loisy says,
determined to survive and to conquer, and adapted itself to the demands
of the time. It has travelled far from the simple teaching of the
earthly Christ; though we may, if we choose, hold that His spirit
continued to direct the growing and changing institution which, as a
matter of history, had its source in the Galilean ministry. In truth,
however, the extremely efficient organisation of the Roman Church began
in self-defence and was continued for conquest. It is one of the
strongest of all human institutions, so that it was said before the war
that it is one of the 'three invincibles,' the other two being the
German Army and the Standard Oil Trust.

But our admiration for the subtle and tenacious power of this
corporation must not blind us to its essentially political character.
Its policy has been always directed to self-preservation and
aggrandisement; it is an _imperium in imperio_, which has only checked
fanatical nationalism by the competing influence of a still more
fanatical partisanship. In the present war, the problem before the
Pope's councillors was whether the friendship of the Central Powers or
that of the Entente was best worth cultivating; and the unshaken loyalty
of Austria to the Church, together with a natu