- chaeism, borrowed Christian elements and might not have
aspired to more than a passive influence but for their rivalry with that religion. From these considerations we may draw the inference that only for the Palestinian capture of the psychical yearnings of the age history might never have had to record the lapse of social Europe into the slough of mediaevalism; and the experience of a terrestrial hierarch who should give laws to kings and incite the masses to rebel against their political rulers would have been lost to Western civilization. That the Empire would have subsisted until modern times is inconceivable; the tendency to disruption of the vast fabric soon became apparent, and its unity was only restored by reconquest on several occasions; notably by Severus, by Constantine, by Theodosius. Under Diocletian it was virtually transformed into a number of federated states; and by the sixth or seventh century a somewhat similar partition might have become definite and permanent. With the maintenance of sociological institutions at the original level, barbarism would have been repelled and civilization would have penetrated more rapidly the forests of Scythia and Germany. The spirit of scientific inquiry which was manifest in Strabo, in Pliny, in Ptolemy, in Galen, might have been fostered and extended; and many a leading mind, whose vigour was absorbed by the arid waste of theology, might have taken up the work of Aristotle and carried his researches into the heart of contemporary science.[1]*
- ↑ It is generally suggested that the constant immigration of barbarians and their wholesale collocation in the army must have gradually undermined the civilization of the Empire. But a great state is able to digest an enormous quantity of such accretions; and in the pride of their recent elevation such new citizens would have become more Roman than the Romans themselves. The great Transatlantic Republic has been built up during three centuries by the immigration of alien barbarians.
