organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.
In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of
men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or
degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the
material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new
forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of
building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.

Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this
developed around the shores of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of
slavery: Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were
small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly
privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves. All
the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science,
letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and
civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society,
was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. But
freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when
the body is in bondage. The slaves of antiquity were free neither in
body nor in soul, but with the coming of Christianity all this was
changed, for it is one of the great glories of the Christian religion
that it gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give
freedom to the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire,
and with the infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery
gradually disappeared, and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real
liberty existed as the product of Christianity and under its protection.
Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the
guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so
to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the
lines of demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the