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 divinity but to human nature, immediately began to be agitated.”  “I affirm,” says Mr. Maine, “without hesitation, that the difference between the two theological systems is accounted for by the fact that, in passing from the East to the West, theological speculation had passed from a climate of Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law.  For some centuries before these controversies rose into overwhelming importance, all the intellectual activity of the Western Romans had been expended on jurisprudence exclusively.