o blessing seemed to
rest on the succession of a son to his father; much, on the contrary, on
the adoption of a stranger of tried capacity guided by the choice of the
actual ruler. But in the lapse of centuries the imperial power had become
absolute. Especially in the successors of Constantine, and in the city to
which he had given his name and chosen for the home of his empire, not a
shadow of the old Roman freedom remained. One after another the successful
general or the adventurer in some court intrigue supplanted or murdered a
predecessor, and ascended the throne, but with undiminished prerogatives.
Great was the contrast in all the new kingdoms at whose birth the influence
of the Church presided. There the kings all sat by family descent, in
which, however, was involved a free acceptance on the part of their people.
The bishops who had had so large a part in the foundation of the several
kingdoms had a recognised part in their future government. Holding one
faith, and educated in the law of the Romans, and joined on to the
preceding ages by their mental culture as well as their belief, they
contributed to these kingdoms a stability and cohesion which were wanting
to the Teuton invaders in themselves. They incessantly preached peace as a
religious necessity to those tribes which had been as ready to consume
each other as to divide the spoils of their Roman subjects. This united
phalanx of bishops in Gaul conquered in the end even the excessive
degeneracy, self-indulgence, and cruelty of the Merovingian race. Thanks to
their perpetual efforts, while the policy of a Clovis made a France, the
wickedness of his descendants did not destroy it, but only themselves, and
caused a new family to be chosen wherein the same tempered government might
be carried on.

It is remarkable that while the Byzantine emperors, from the extinction of
the western empire, were using their absolute power to meddle with the
doctrine of the Church which Constantine acknowledged to be divine, and to
fetter its liberty which he acknowledged to be unquestionable, the Popes
from that very time were through the bishops, to whom they were the sole
centre in so many changes and upheavals, constructing the new order of
things. Through them the Church maintained her own liberty, and allied with
it a civil liberty which the East had more and more surrendered.

In the East, the Church in time was younger than the empire; in the West,
she preceded in time