which the Pope stood from the year 455; and he
stood in it for three hundred years. The testimony which such times bear is
a proof superadded to the words of Fathers and the decrees of Councils.

But there is one other point in the political situation on which a word
must be said.

From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the
West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops,
subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing
support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or
Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling,--with him and in him they are Catholic. Let
me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The
Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its
government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different
functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying
points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general,
the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this
epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been
a Church, I do not know what would have become of it in the midst of the
Roman empire's fall. I confine myself to purely human considerations: I put
aside every element foreign to the natural consequences of natural facts.
If Christianity had only been a belief, a feeling, an individual
conviction, we may suppose that it would have broken down at the
dissolution of the empire and the barbarian invasion. It did break down
later in Asia and in all north Africa beneath an invasion of the same
kind--that of barbarous Mussulmans. It broke down then though it was an
institution, a constituted Church. Much more might the same fact have
happened at the moment of the Roman empire's fall. There were then none of
those means by which in the present day moral influences are established or
support themselves independent of institutions: no means by which a naked
truth, a naked idea, acquires a great power over minds, rules actions, and
determines events. Nothing of the kind existed in the fourth century to
invest ideas and personal feelings with such an authority. It is clear that
a strongly organised, a strongly governed, society was needed to struggle
against so great a disaster, to overcome such a hurricane. I think I do not
go too far in affirming that, at the end of the fourth an