State. There were no conflicts between the State and religion, for these were indivisible. But evidently this condition of affairs imposed the most serious restrictions on the individual, who had thus no foothold from which to oppose the will of his fellows. He had no religion to support him against State tyranny, for religion and the State were amalgamated, the State being the Church.
It was Athens, then, who set out to break this bond. Her thinkers were the first to argue that man is a citizen not of a city state but of the universe, and is bound ultimately by the laws of reason alone. They told the world, in the words of Epictetus, to look to the laws of the living godhead, not to the laws of dead men. These new ideas transferred freedom from the forum of the city to the forum of the conscience, and the Roman disciples of the Stoics dispersed their principles throughout the world.
Nevertheless, this first epoch of freedom ended, after all, in failure. The barriers, raised by metaphysics before authority, were not strong enough to resist the impact of absolutism. Reason could not found a Church, to make head against the Cæsars.
The second stage of liberty arose in the Middle Ages, in protest against the undue assumptions of the Church over the State. Whereas antiquity had identified Church and State, mediævalism separated them, but gave precedence to the Church. When Gregory VII. said that the papacy was the master
