society becomes a den of
cut-throats and a brothel.[5322]

After contemplating this spectacle near by, we can value the
contribution to modern societies of Christianity, how much modesty,
gentleness and humanity it has introduced into them, how it maintains
integrity, good faith and justice. Neither philosophic reason, artistic
or literary culture, or even feudal, military or chivalric honor, nor
any administration or government can replace it. There is nothing else
to restrain our natal bent, nothing to arrest the insensible, steady,
down-hill course of our species with the whole of its original burden,
ever retrograding towards the abyss. Whatever its present envelope may
be, the old Gospel still serves as the best auxiliary of the social
instinct.

Among its three contemporary forms, that which groups together the most
men, about 180 millions of believers, is Catholicism, in other words,
Roman Christianity, which two words, comprising a definition, contain
a history. At the origin, on the birth of the Christian principle, it
expressed itself at first in Hebrew, the language of prophets and
of seers; afterwards, and very soon, in Greek, the language of the
dialecticians and philosophers; at last, and very late, in Latin, the
language of the jurisconsults and statesmen; then come the successive
stages of dogma. All the evangelical and apostolic texts, written in
Greek, all the metaphysical speculations,[5323] also in Greek, which
served as commentary on these, reached the western Latins only
through translations. Now, in metaphysics, Latin poorly translates the
Greek[5324]; it lacks both the terms and the ideas; what the Orient
says, the Occident only half comprehends; it accepts this without
dispute and confidently holds it as truth.[5325] At length in its turn,
in the fourth century, when, after Theodosius, the Occident breaks loose
from the Orient, it intervenes, and it intervenes with its language,
that is to say with the provision of ideas and words which its culture
provided; it likewise had its instruments of precision, not those of
Plato and Aristotle, but others, as special, forged by Ulpian, Gaius
and twenty generations of jurists through the original invention and
immemorial labor of Roman genius. "To say what is law," to impose rules
of conduct on men, is, in abridged form, the entire practical work of
the Roman people; to write this law out, to formulate and coordinate
these rules, is, in abridged form,