208 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [ft. ii. 



But wlien Ptome liad extended her "beneficent sway over 

 all the precincts of the ]\Iediterranean, nniting communities 

 hitherto autonomous and hostile by common interests of 

 culture and of commerce, and bringing aggressive warfare to an 

 end in the Pax Romana, then there became possible a cosmo- 

 politan spirit, a Christian feeling, which regarded all men as 

 legally and ethically equal, — equal before the Emperor, and 

 equal before God. To trace the slow growth of this feeling 

 in the annals of Eoman law and of Stoic philosophy, and 

 to observe its culmination in the genesis of Christianity,^ is 

 to obtain the key to Eoman history. 



But great political changes were necessary before Eome 

 could carry to the end its great work, — partly because it had 

 increased in size so much faster than it increased in structure. 

 It crushed autonomism too rapidly. It developed imperialism 

 at the expense of nationality. And hence the time at last 

 arrived when the mutual cohesion of its provinces became 

 too slight to withstand those barbaric assaults from without, 

 which — as we should be careful to remember — had all along 

 been intermittently attempted from the days of Brennus to 

 those of Alaric. For a time, European society seemed likely 

 to disintegrate into a set of tribal communities. But the old 

 Empire had done its work too thoroughly for that. Eoman 

 principles, embodied in the Catholic Church, and in the 

 renovated Empire of Charles the Great, exerted an organizing 

 power which prevailed over the spirit of clannish isolation, 

 and by effecting the grand series of compromises which we 

 vaguely designate as the feudal system, laid the basis of 

 modern society. 



If now we examine the ethical circumstances of that vast 

 modern fabric which has been reared upon material supplied 



* Of course it is not meant to imply that other elements were not at work 

 in the genesis of Christianity. The growth of what Matthew Arnold calls 

 the "spirit of Hebraism," not in Judaea merely, but throughout the Grseco- 

 Romau world, is an interesting phenomenon in this connection, but tte 

 tieatmeut of ii does not fall within the scope of the present exposition. 



