exaggerate the insignificant barbaric influences which came from outside
the Empire and did nothing to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire
or its religion have at any time ceased to be--that is, to pretend that
there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past and the
present of Europe--all these pretensions are parts of one historical
falsehood.

In all by which we Europeans differ from the rest of mankind there is
_nothing_ which was not originally peculiar to the Roman Empire, or is not
demonstrably derived from something peculiar to it.

In material objects the whole of our wheeled traffic, our building
materials, brick, glass, mortar, cut-stone, our cooking, our staple food
and drink; in forms, the arch, the column, the bridge, the tower, the well,
the road, the canal; in expression, the alphabet, the very words of most of
our numerous dialects and polite languages, the order of still more, the
logical sequence of our thought--all spring from that one source. So with
implements: the saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, the file, the
spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder; all these we have from
that same origin. Of our institutions it is the same story. The divisions
and the sub-divisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province,
the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the emplacement of
the great European cities, the routes of communication between them, the
universities, the Parliaments, the Courts of Law, and their jurisprudence,
all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly foundations
of our civilization with the Catholic or universal religion of it, is to
limit the latter and to make of it a merely human thing.