24 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
spirit of the gospel of Christ. The materials upon which it had to work were the habits and usages of the various tribes of early converted barbarians, together with the inheritance left by the fallen civilization of the Roman empire, which had never ceased to be pagan in its essence. The task was one of prodi- gious difficulty, but it seemed well on its way to perfect accom- plishment before it was interrupted by the Pagan Renaissance.
In the form of barbarian lawlessness on the one hand, and unprincipled Caesarism on the other, the old pagan traditions survived in the midst of the superimposed Christianit}-, and ensconced themselves in the sanctuary as well as in the council chamber. But the dominant ideals, the principles held forth by all who professed to have principles, the approved institutions, and the general order of society, so far as peace and tranquillity were effectually secured, presented the broad outlines of a truly Christian civilization, which gave promise of still brighter things in the future.
After the more burdensome part of the work of pacification and reconstruction had been accomplished, and the heroic age of Christendom had been succeeded by the unexampled intel- lectual activities of the scholastic period, the latent paganism began, with the universalization of learning and the wholesale reproduction of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (to say nothing of the Teutonic sagas), to emerge from the underworld of passion, and atavistic instinct, and old tradition, into the open field of letters, and art, and law. The study of the Jus- tinian code furnished an eagerly welcomed justification of the aggressions of autocrats. The rise of classical purism discred- ited the whole line of great Christian philosophers, whose lan- guage, even in the most favorable instances, seemed uncouth and barbarous when measured by a Ciceronian standard. The living Latin, with the living literature, Christian and pre-Chris- tian, which it enshrined, was crowded aside by the dead lan- guages and literatures of a former millennium, and a new culture sprang up which lived wholly in the remote past, and despised all the Christian ages. A gulf was thus fixed between the learned class and the masses of the people, greater than that
