the
western empire, taking up the secular capital into a new spiritual Rome,
and creating a Christendom out of the northern tribes who had subverted the
Roman empire.

There is, I think, no greater wonder in human history than the creation of
a hierarchy out of the principle of headship and subordination contained in
our Lord's charge to Peter. It has been pointed out that the constitution
of the Nicene Council itself manifested this principle, and was the proof
of its spontaneous action in the preceding centuries, while its overt
recognition, as seated in the Roman Pontiff, is seen in the pontificate of
St. Leo.

There is a second wonder in human history, on which it is the purpose of
this volume to dwell. The Roman empire, in which the Pax Romana had
provided a mould of widespread civilisation for the Church's growth, was
at length broken up in the western half of it, by Teuton invaders occupying
its provinces. These were all, at the time of their settlement, either
pagan or Arian. There followed, in a certain lapse of time, the creation of
a body of States whose centre of union and belief was the See of Peter.
That is the creation of Christendom proper. The wonder seen is that the
northern tribes, impinging on the empire, and settling on its various
provinces like vultures, became the matter into which the Holy See, guiding
and unifying the episcopate, maintaining the original principle of
celibacy, and planting it in the institute of the religious life through
various countries depopulated or barbarous, infused into the whole mass one
spirit, so that Arians became Catholics, Teuton raiders issued into
Christian kings, savage tribes thrown upon captive provincials coalesced
into nations, while all were raised together into, not a restored empire of
Augustus, but an empire holy as well as Roman, whose chief was the Church's
defender (_advocatus ecclesiae_), whose creator was the Roman Peter.

It is not a little remarkable that this signal recognition by the Fourth
General Council of the Roman Pontiff's authority coincided in time with the
utter powerlessness to which Rome as a city was reduced. That city, on
whose glory as queen of nations and civiliser of the earth her own bishop
had dwelt with all the fondness of a Roman, when, year by year, on the
least of St. Peter and St. Paul, he addressed the assembled episcopate of
Italy, ran twice, in his own time, the most imminent danger of ceasing to
exist. Italy was ab