een poured out on all flesh; and from one end
of the Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperor
on his throne, all hearts were either hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, or learning to do homage to those who did so. And He who
excited the craving, was also furnishing that which would satisfy
it; and was teaching mankind, by a long and painful education, to
distinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find,
for the first time in the world's life, a good news not merely for the
select few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.

For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and the
Christian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment, had
been developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers, in
deadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The weapons of
the Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical force, and a
ruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more powerful still, an
unequalled genius for organisation, and an uniform system of external
law and order. This was generally a real boon to conquered nations,
because it substituted a fixed and regular spoliation for the fortuitous
and arbitrary miseries of savage warfare: but it arrayed, meanwhile,
on the side of the Empire the wealthier citizens of every province, by
allowing them their share in the plunder of the labouring masses below
them. These, in the country districts, were utterly enslaved; while
in the cities, nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept from
starvation by the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish good
humour by a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms of
nature and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocity
of a degraded populace.

Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now four
hundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing message,
and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and virtue, of love
and self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier to melt and weld
together the hearts of men, than all the force and terror, all the
mechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with which the Empire
had been contending against that Gospel in which it had recognised
instinctively and at first sight, its internecine foe.

And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this world
had confounded the strong. In spite of the d