the study, taking Christianity as a
chapter, important but separate, in the history of the Empire. If
for three centuries Christianity has been gradually returning to its
origin, that is, becoming purely a religion and a moral teaching,
for some centuries in the ancient world it was a thing much more
complicated; a government and an administration that willed not only
to regulate the relations between man and God, but to govern the
intellectual, social, moral, political, and economic life of the
people! The historian ought to explain how this new Empire--for it was
indeed a new Empire--was formed in Rome and upon its ruins: this is a
problem much more intricate than at first appears.

It has been said and often repeated that the Church was in the Middle
Ages in Europe the continuation of the Roman Empire, that the Pope is
yet the real successor of the Emperor in Rome. In fact he carries one
of the Emperor's titles, _Pontifex maximus_. The observation is just,
but it should not make us forget that the Christian Empire, so to call
it, and the Roman Empire, were between themselves as radically
opposed as two forces that created the one and the other; politics and
intellectuality. The diplomatists, the generals, the legislators of
Rome created by political means, by wars, treaties, laws, a grand
economic and political unity, which they consolidated, quite giving
up the formation of a large intellectual and moral unity. The
intellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Church
after the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and of
empire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concrete
world of economic and political interests, to the world of ideas
and beliefs. They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of the
Scipios, of Lucullus, and of Caesar, to conquer the world, not indeed
invading it with armies, but spreading a new faith, creating a new
morality, a new metaphysics which must gather up within themselves
the intellectual activities of Graeco-Latin culture, from history to
science, from law to philosophy.

The Church of the Middle Ages was therefore the most splendid edifice
that the intellectual classes have so far created. The power of this
empire of men of letters increased, as little by little the other
empire, that of the generals and diplomats, declined. Christianity saw
with indifference the Roman Empire decay; indeed, when it could,
it helped on the disintegra