Law appears from the very beginnings of the Roman state.  The oldest traditions make Romulus, Numa, and Servius to be legislators.  From that time, after the expulsion of the Tarquins, Rome was governed by laws.  Even the despotism of the Caesars did not interfere with the general administration of the laws in civil affairs; for the one-man power, though it may corrupt and degrade a state, does not immediately and directly affect many persons in their private lives.  Law continued to rule in common affairs, and this legacy of a society organized by law was the gift of Rome to modern Europe.  How great a blessing it has been may be seen by comparing the worst Christian government with the best of the despotic governments of Asia.  Mohammedan 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 this way by the mediaeval church.