Shall we not, then, conclude with Cicero, who, quoted by Lactantius, says:  “One eternal and immutable law embraces all things and all times?”

CHAPTER X.

Latin Christianity in relation to modern civilization.

For more than a thousand years Latin Christianity controlled the intelligence of Europe, and is responsible for the result.

That result is manifested by the condition of the city of Rome at the Reformation, and by the condition of the Continent of Europe in domestic and social life.—­European nations suffered under the coexistence of a dual government, a spiritual and a temporal.—­They were immersed in ignorance, superstition, discomfort.—­Explanation of the failure of Catholicism—­Political history of the papacy:  it was transmuted from a spiritual confederacy into an absolute monarchy.—­Action of the College of Cardinals and the Curia-Demoralization that ensued from the necessity of raising large revenues.

The advantages accruing to Europe during the Catholic rule arose not from direct intention, but were incidental.

The general result is, that the political influence of Catholicism was prejudicial to modern civilization.

Latin Christianity is responsible for the condition and progress of Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century.  We have now to examine how it discharged its trust.

It will be convenient to limit to the case of Europe what has here to be presented, though, from the claim of the papacy to superhuman origin, and its demand for universal obedience, it should strictly be held to account for the condition of all mankind.  Its inefficacy against the great and venerable religions of Southern and Eastern Asia would furnish an important and instructive theme for consideration, and lead us to the conclusion that it has impressed itself only where Roman imperial influences have prevailed; a political conclusion which, however, it contemptuously rejects.

Doubtless at the inception of the Reformation there were many persons who compared the existing social condition with what it had been in ancient times.  Morals had not changed, intelligence had not advanced, society had little improved.  From the Eternal City itself its splendors had vanished.  The marble streets, of which Augustus had once boasted, had disappeared.  Temples, broken columns, and the long, arcaded vistas of gigantic aqueducts bestriding the desolate Campagna, presented a mournful scene.  From the uses to which they had been respectively put, the Capitol had been known as Goats’ Hill, and the site of the Roman Forum, whence laws had been issued to the world, as Cows’ Field.  The palace of the Caesars was hidden by mounds of earth, crested with flowering shrubs.  The baths of Caracalla, with their porticoes, gardens, reservoirs, had long ago become useless through the destruction of their supplying