hammedan society is ruled by a hierarchy of
tyranny, each little tyrant being in turn the victim of the one above him.

The feudal system, introduced by the Teutonic races, attempted to organize
Europe on the basis of military despotism; but Roman law was too strong
for feudal law, and happily for mankind overcame it and at last expelled
it.

Christianity, in its ready hospitality for all the truth and good which it
encounters, accepted Roman jurisprudence and gave to it a new lease of
life.[315] Christian emperors and Christian lawyers codified the long line
of decrees and enactments reaching back to the Twelve Tables, and
established them as the laws of the Christian world. But the spirit of
Roman law acted on Christianity in a more subtle manner. It reproduced the
organic character of the Roman state in the Western Latin Church, and it
reproduced the soul of Roman law in the Western Latin theology.

It has not always been sufficiently considered how much the Latin Church
was a reproduction, on a higher plane, of the old Roman Commonwealth. The
resemblance between the Roman Catholic ceremonies and those of Pagan Rome
has been often noticed. The Roman Catholic Church has borrowed from
Paganism saints' days, incense, lustrations, consecrations of sacred
places, votive-offerings, relics; winking, nodding, sweating, and bleeding
images; holy water, vestments, etc. But the Church of Rome itself, in its
central idea of authority, is a reproduction of the Roman state religion,
which was a part of the Roman state. The Eastern churches were sacerdotal
and religious; the Church of Rome added to these elements that of an
organized political authority. It was the resurrection of Rome,--Roman
ideas rising into a higher life. The Roman Catholic Church, at first an
aristocratic republic, like the Roman state, afterwards became, like the
Roman state, a disguised despotism. The Papal Church is therefore a legacy
of ancient Rome.[316]

And just as the Roman state was first a help and then a hindrance to the
progress of humanity, so it has been with the Roman Catholic Church.
Ancient Rome gradually bound together into a vast political unity the
divided tribes and states of Europe, and so infused into them the
civilization which she had developed or received. And so the Papal Church
united Europe again, and once more permeated it with the elements of law,
of order, of Christian faith. All intelligent Protestants admit the good
done in