ual help, support, or edification, balanced to
some extent the prevailing social cleavage, by a free democratic
organisation. They gave to many individuals in their small circle the
rights which they did not possess in the great world, and were
frequently of service in obtaining admission for new cults. Even the new
piety and cosmopolitan disposition seem to have turned to them in order
to find within them forms of expression. But the time had not come for
the greater corporate unions, and of an organised connection of
societies in one city with those of another we know nothing. The state
kept these associations under strict control. It granted them only to
the poorest classes (_collegia tenuiorum_) and had the strictest laws in
readiness for them. These free unions, however, did not in their
historical importance approach the fabric of the Roman state in which
they stood. That represented the union of the greater part of humanity
under one head, and also more and more under one law. Its capital was
the capital of the world, and also, from the beginning of the third
century, of religious syncretism. Hither migrated all who desired to
exercise an influence on the great scale: Jew, Chaldean, Syrian priest,
and Neoplatonic teacher. Law and Justice radiated from Rome to the
provinces, and in their light nationalities faded away, and a
cosmopolitanism was developed which pointed beyond itself, because the
moral spirit can never find its satisfaction in that which is realised.
When that spirit finally turned away from all political life, and after
having laboured for the ennobling of the empire, applied itself, in
Neoplatonism, to the idea of a new and free union of men, this certainly
was the result of the felt failure of the great creation, but it
nevertheless had that creation for its presupposition. The Church
appropriated piecemeal the great apparatus of the Roman state, and gave
new powers, new significance and respect to every article that had been
depreciated. But what is of greatest importance is that the Church by
her preaching would never have gained whole circles, but only
individuals, had not the universal state already produced a neutralising
of nationalities and brought men nearer each other in temper and
disposition.

3. Perhaps the most decisive factor in bringing about the revolution of
religious and moral convictions and moods, was philosophy, which in
almost all its schools and representatives, had deepene