[Footnote 7: The municipal bodies of the Roman towns were called curiæ, and the members of those bodies, who were very numerous, curiales.]
'We design by this measure to confer great advantages and an important boon on the inhabitants of our provinces. We are likewise assured of adding to the embellishment of the city of Arles, to the fidelity of which we owe much, according to our brother and patrician. [Footnote 8]
[Footnote 8: Constantine, the second husband of Placidea, whom Honorius had taken for a colleague in 421.]
'Given on the 15th of the calends of May, and received at Arles the 10th of the calends of June.'
The provinces and towns refused the boon; no deputies were named, no one would go to Arles. Centralisation and unity were contrary to the primitive nature of that society; the spirit of locality, of municipality, was displayed in full force, and the impossibility of reconstituting a general society or country was clearly evidenced. The towns shut themselves up within their walls, and looked not beyond their own affairs; and the Empire fell because no one would be of the Empire, because the citizens would no longer concern themselves with anything but their own city. Thus, at the fall of the Roman Empire, we find again the same fact that was observable at its commencement—the predominance of the municipal form and spirit. The Roman world returned to its first condition: towns had formed it; it was dissolved, but the towns remained.
It is the municipal system that the ancient Roman civilisation bequeathed to modern Europe; in a very irregular and weakened form, and doubtless very inferior to what it had been in the early times, but still the only real constituted system which had alone survived all the elements of the Roman world.
When I say alone, I am wrong. Another fact, another idea, equally survived—namely, the idea of the Empire, the name of the emperor, the maxim of imperial majesty, and of an absolute, sacred power, attached to that name. These are the elements that Roman civilisation transmitted to the European civilisation; on one hand, the municipal system, its customs, rules, and precedents, containing the germ of liberty; on the other, a uniform and universal civil legislation, coupled with the idea of the absolute power and the sacred majesty of the imperial name, containing the principle of order and subjection.
Influence Of The Church.
But at the same time a very different society, founded upon totally distinct principles, animated by other sentiments, and one destined to infuse into the modern European civilisation elements of quite a different nature, had arisen in the bosom of the Roman society—namely, the Christian church. I speak peculiarly of the Christian church, and not of Christianity. At the end of the fourth, and commencement of the fifth century, Christianity had ceased to be simply an individual creed; it had become an institution, and had taken a constituted form; it had its own government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy arranged for the different clerical functions, revenues, means for independent action, and rallying-points suitable to a great society, provincial, national, and oecumenical councils, and the custom of deliberating in common upon the affairs of the society. In a word, Christianity at this epoch was not merely a religion, it was a church.
If it had not been a church, it is impossible to say what might have happened to it amid the fall of the Roman Empire. I confine myself to purely human considerations; I put aside every element foreign to the natural consequences deducible from natural facts; and I believe that if Christianity had been, as in the early times, only an individual belief, sentiment, or conviction, it would have sunk under the ruins of the Empire, and the invasions of the barbarians. It succumbed at a later date in Asia and in the north of Africa, under an invasion of the same nature, an invasion of Moslem barbarians, even when it was in a state of institution, when it was an established church. Much more might the same result have occurred at the fall of the Roman Empire. There were at that time none of the means in existence by which at the present day moral influences are established or offer resistance independently of institutions, none of the means by which a mere truth or idea acquires an empire over the minds of men, governs actions, and determines events. Nothing existed in the fourth century to give to personal ideas and sentiments such a sway. It is clear that a society powerfully organised and vigorously governed was needed to struggle against so destructive a crisis, and to arise victorious from so fearful a conflict. It is not therefore too much to affirm that, at the end of the fourth, and beginning of the fifth century, it was the Christian church which saved Christianity; it was the church, with its institutions, its magistrates, its temporal power, which strove triumphantly against the internal dissolution which convulsed the Empire, and against barbarity which subdued the barbarians themselves, and became the link, the medium, the principle of civilisation, as between the Roman and barbarian worlds. Hence it is the state of the church rather than of Christianity, properly so called, in the fifth century, which ought to be investigated, in order to discover in what Christianity has from that period aided modern civilisation, and what elements it has introduced. An inquiry necessarily arises, What was the Christian church at that epoch?