gods held undisputed sway.
They could only be conceived of as existing as long as the nation
existed. They fell with its decline. This doctrine of the old
nationalities brought about the Roman Empire, whose economic conditions
we do not need to examine just now. The old national gods fell, as those
of the Romans did also, which were only attached to the narrow limits of
the city of Rome. The desire to make the empire a world-empire, by means
of a world-wide religion, is clearly shown in the attempts to provide
recognition and altars in Rome for all the respectable foreign gods,
next to the indigenous ones. But a new world-religion was not to be made
in this fashion by imperial decrees. The new world-religion,
Christianity, had already arisen in secret by a mixture of combined
oriental religions, Jewish theology and popularized Greek philosophy and
particularly Stoic philosophy. We must first be at the pains to discover
how it originally made its appearance, since its official form as it has
come to us is merely that of a State religion, and this end was achieved
through the Council of Nice. Enough, the fact that after two hundred and
fifty years it was a state religion shows that it was a religion
answering to the circumstances of the times. In the Middle Ages it
showed itself clearly. In proportion as feudalism developed it grew into
a religion corresponding with it, with a hierarchy corresponding to the
feudal. And when the rule of the bourgeois came in, it developed into
Protestant heresy in antagonism to feudal Catholicism, at first in the
South of France, among the Albigenses at the time of the highest growth
of the free cities. The Middle Ages had annexed all the surviving forms
of ideology, philosophy, politics and jurisprudence, to theology as
subordinate parts of theology. It constrained, therefore, all social and
political movement to assume a theological form; finally, to the minds
of the masses stuffed with religion it was necessary to show their
interests in religious guise, in order to raise a tremendous storm. And
as the rule of the bourgeois from the beginning brought into being an
appendage of propertyless plebeians, with day laborers and servants of
all sorts, without any recognized position in their cities, the
forerunners of the later proletarians, so the heresy was very early
subdivided into a moderate one, on the part of the citizens, and a
plebeian revolutionary one, which was an abomination to the