rch. Yet this new and determining
characteristic was already fortified by tradition. The Church triumphant
had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model of the Imperial
bureaucracy. Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a
hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at
Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation
of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable
fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the
Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of
the Latin world on the other.

The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its
Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and
ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek 'koine' and by keeping the
Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch
with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors. The
vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during the Dark Age, when
all the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for
survival; but about a third of the greatest authors' greatest works had
been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the
remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and
encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for
these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in
their libraries they were henceforth studied, cherished, and above all
recopied with more or less systematic care.

The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present, but
the most direct link of all was the political survival of the Empire.
Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away. The marvellous system of
Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in the throes of
dissolution. Within a century of its final codification by Justinian's
commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was now replaced by
more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued with Mosaic
principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of the New
Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the _Lex Talionis_.
The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and elaborated by
Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps districts were the
only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age. Yet the tra