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 devilish cruelties of
persecutors; in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin which
surrounded her; in spite of having to form herself, not out of a
race of pure and separate creatures, but by a most literal 'new