power of sweetness
and patience," in dealing with matters like pagan art, pagan literature
was even then manifest; and has the character of the moderation, the
divine moderation of Christ himself. It was only among the ignorant,
indeed, only in the "villages," that Christianity, even in conscious
triumph over paganism, was really betrayed into iconoclasm. In the
final "Peace" of the Church under Constantine, while there was plenty
of destructive fanaticism in the country, the revolution was
accomplished in the larger towns, in a manner more orderly and
discreet--in the Roman manner. The faithful were bent less on the
destruction of the old pagan temples than on their conversion to a new
and higher use; and, with much beautiful furniture ready to hand, they
became Christian sanctuaries.

[125] Already, in accordance with such maturer wisdom, the church of
the "Minor Peace" had adopted many of the graces of pagan feeling and
pagan custom; as being indeed a living creature, taking up,
transforming, accommodating still more closely to the human heart what
of right belonged to it. In this way an obscure synagogue was expanded
into the catholic church. Gathering, from a richer and more varied
field of sound than had remained for him, those old Roman harmonies,
some notes of which Gregory the Great, centuries later, and after
generations of interrupted development, formed into the Gregorian
music, she was already, as we have heard, the house of song--of a
wonderful new music and poesy. As if in anticipation of the sixteenth
century, the church was becoming "humanistic," in an earlier, and
unimpeachable Renaissance. Singing there had been in abundance from
the first; though often it dared only be "of the heart." And it burst
forth, when it might, into the beginnings of a true ecclesiastical
music; the Jewish psalter, inherited from the synagogue, turning now,
gradually, from Greek into Latin--broken Latin, into Italian, as the
ritual use of the rich, fresh, expressive vernacular superseded the
earlier authorised language of the Church. Through certain surviving
remnants of Greek in the later Latin liturgies, we may still discern a
highly interesting intermediate phase of ritual development, when the
Greek [126] and the Latin were in combination; the poor, surely!--the
poor and the children of that liberal Roman church--responding already
in their own "vulgar tongue," to an office said in the original,
liturgical Greek