e, three thousand
years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh
fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of
Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia.

As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For
twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of
the day. One thing--and one thing alone--saved Europe from complete
destruction, from a return to the days of cave-men and the hyena.

This was the church--the flock of humble men and women who for many
centuries had confessed themselves the followers of Jesus, the carpenter
of Nazareth, who had been killed that the mighty Roman Empire might be
saved the trouble of a street-riot in a little city somewhere along the
Syrian frontier.

RISE OF THE CHURCH

HOW ROME BECAME THE CENTRE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

THE average intelligent Roman who lived under the Empire had taken very
little interest in the gods of his fathers. A few times a year he went
to the temple, but merely as a matter of custom. He looked on
patiently when the people celebrated a religious festival with a solemn
procession. But he regarded the worship of Jupiter and Minerva and
Neptune as something rather childish, a survival from the crude days
of the early republic and not a fit subject of study for a man who had
mastered the works of the Stoics and the Epicureans and the other great
philosophers of Athens.

This attitude made the Roman a very tolerant man. The government
insisted that all people, Romans, foreigners, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews,
should pay a certain outward respect to the image of the Emperor
which was supposed to stand in every temple, just as a picture of
the President of the United States is apt to hang in an American Post
Office. But this was a formality without any deeper meaning. Generally
speaking everybody could honour, revere and adore whatever gods he
pleased, and as a result, Rome was filled with all sorts of queer little
temples and synagogues, dedicated to the worship of Egyptian and African
and Asiatic divinities.

When the first disciples of Jesus reached Rome and began to preach their
new doctrine of a universal brotherhood of man, nobody objected. The man
in the street stopped and listened Rome, the capital of the world,
had always been full of wandering preachers, each proclaiming his
own "mystery." Most of the self-appointed priests appealed to the
senses--promised go