this way by the mediaeval church.

For example, Milman[317] says, speaking of Gregory the Great and his work,
that it was necessary that there should be some central power like the
Papacy to resist the dissolution of society at the downfall of the Roman
Empire. "The life and death of Christianity" depended, he says, "on the
rise of such a power." "It is impossible to conceive what had been the
confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the Middle Ages, without
the mediaeval Papacy."

The whole history of Rome had infused into the minds of Western nations a
conviction of the importance of centralization in order to union. From
Rome, as a centre, had proceeded government, law, civilization.
Christianity therefore seemed to need a like centre, in order to retain
its unity. Hence the supremacy early yielded to the Bishop of Rome. His
primacy was accepted, because it was useful. The Papal Church would never
have existed, if Rome and its organizing ideas had not existed before
Christianity was born.

In like manner the ideas developed in the Roman mind determined the course
of Western theology, as differing from that of the East. It is well known
that Eastern theological speculation was occupied with the nature of God
and the person of Christ, but that Western theology discussed sin and
salvation. Mr. Maine, in his work on "Ancient Law," considers this
difference to have been occasioned by habits of thought produced by Roman
jurisprudence. I quote his language at some length:--

"What has to be determined is whether jurisprudence has ever served as the
medium through which theological principles have been viewed; whether, by
supplying a peculiar language, a peculiar mode of reasoning, and a
peculiar solution of many of the problems of life, it has ever opened new
channels in which theological speculation could flow out and expand
itself."

"On all questions," continues Mr. Maine, quoting Dean Milman, "which
concerned the person of Christ and the nature of the Trinity, the Western
world accepted passively the dogmatic system of the East." "But as soon as
the Latin-speaking empire began to live an intellectual life of its own,
its deference to the East was at once exchanged for the agitation of a
number of questions entirely foreign to Eastern speculation." "The nature
of sin and its transmission by inheritance, the debt owed by man and its
vicarious satisfaction, and like theological problems, relating not to the
d