II.
As a mere island of civilization, however, amid an ocean of barbarism, the Roman Empire was only universal in a relative sense. It was limited externally by arbitrary boundaries, and such universality as it achieved it achieved only at the expense of internal vitality. The heavy hand of despotism rested upon it and crushed out freedom, both in the individual and in the community. With freedom went energy and resisting power, as was seen when the wave of conquest had spent itself, and the returning tide of barbarism began to press inwards from without. But for the spread of Christianity, the Empire would have fallen to pieces much sooner than it did; but the triumph of the new faith infused into it fresh vitality, gave it a living principle of cohesion, and for a time promised to consolidate its population into one great Christian nationality on the basis of the Græco-Roman civilization. In the East, indeed, some such result was achieved, and the Empire lingered on for a thousand years, largely through the energy it developed as a Greek national State. But in the West, where the barbarians were too strong or the resisting power too weak, the fabric crumbled away, and centuries of confusion followed, during which civilization seemed often in danger of complete submersion.
But in the West the brief experience of the Roman peace—brief as compared with the aeons of strife that ad preceded, or the long period of confusion that followed—was not forgotten. The idea of the Empire as the central and regulating polity of the Christian world lingered in men's minds, or, rather, became more definite, and gathered fresh significance as time went on. It found embodiment for a moment in the great, if short-lived, creation of Charlemagne; and later again it took visible shape in the Holy Roman Empire of the true Middle Ages, which for three centuries was the leading power in Christendom, and which gave to the
