all legal restraint. There was no appeal from his sentence.
He was the living law. The Roman jurists, whilst they
adorned their writings with the exalted philosophy of the
Stoics, consecrated every excess of Imperial prerogative
with those famous maxims which have been balm to so
many consciences and have sanctioned so much wrong;
and the code of Justinian became the greatest obstacle,
next to feudalism, with which liberty had to contend.
Ancient democracy, as it was in Athens in the best
days of Pericles, or in Rome when Polybius described it,
or even as it is idealised by Aristotle in the Sixth Book
of his Politics, and by Cicero in the beginning of the
Republic, was never more than a partial and insincere
solution of the problem of popular government. The
ancient politicians aimed no higher than to diffuse power
among a numerous class. Their liberty was bound up with
slavery. They never attempted to found a free State on
the thrift and energy of free labour. They never divined
the harder but more grateful task that constitutes the
political life of Christian nations.
By humbling the supremacy of rank and wealth; by forbidding the State to encroach on the domain which belongs to God; by teaching man to love his neighbour as himself; by promoting the sense of equality; by con... demning the pride of race, which was a stimulus of con- quest, and the doctrine of separate descent, which formed the philosopher's defence of slavery; and by addressing not the rulers but the masses of mankind, and making opinion superior to authority, the Church that preached the Gospel to the poor had visible points of contact with democracy. And yet Christianity did not directly influence political progress. The ancient watchword of the Republic was translated by Papinian into the language of the Church: "Summa est ratio quæ pro religione fiat:" and for eleven hundred years, from the first to the last of the Constan tines, the Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan.
Meanwhile Western Europe was overrun by men who in their early home had been Republicans. The primi-
