Three hundred years before Our Lord was born this moral equilibrium was disturbed by the huge and successful adventure of the Macedonian Alexander.
The Greek City States had just been swept under the hegemony of Macedon, when, in the shape of small but invincible armies, the common Greek culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the Levant littoral and much more, were turned into one Hellenized (that is, "Greecified") civilization. The separate cities, of course, survived, and after Alexander's death unity of control was lost in various and fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quarrels of his generals. But the old moral equilibrium was gone and the conception of a general civilization had appeared. Henceforward the Syrian, the Jew, the Egyptian saw with Greek eyes and the Greek tongue was the medium of all the East for a thousand years. Hence are the very earliest names of Christian things, Bishop, Church, Priest, Baptism, Christ, Greek names. Hence all our original documents and prayers are Greek and shine with a Greek light: nor are any so essentially Greek in idea as the four Catholic Gospels.
Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very difficult to follow (since we have only later accounts—and they are drawn from the city's point of view only), became the chief of the City States in the Peninsula. Some few it had conquered in war and had subjected to taxation and to the acceptation of its own laws; many it protected by a sort of superior alliance; with many more its position was ill defined and perhaps in origin had been a position of allied equality. But at any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Hellenization of the East this city had in a slower and less universal way begun to break down the moral equilibrium of the City States in Italy, and had produced between the Apennines and the sea (and in some places beyond the Apennines) a society in which the City State, though of coarse surviving, was no longer isolated or sovereign, but formed part of a larger and already definite scheme. The city which had arrived at such a position, and which was now the manifest capital of the Italian scheme, was ROME.
Contemporary with the last successes of this development in Italy went a rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come into conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was the commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that is, a Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread of its spirit and for the domination of its laws and modes of thought. The business of Carthage was to enrich itself: not indirectly as do soldiers (who achieve riches as but one consequence of the pursuit of arms), but directly, as do merchants, by using men indirectly, by commerce, and by the exploitation of contracts.
The Carthaginian occupied mining centres in Spain, and harbors wherever he could find them, especially in the Western Mediterranean. He employed mercenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly step by step, as does the military type, but true to the type of every commercial empire, from his own time to our own, the Carthaginian built up a scattered hotchpotch of dominion, bound together by what is today called the "Command of the Sea."
That command was long absolute and Carthaginian power depended on it wholly. But such a power could not co-exist with the growing strength of martial Italy. Rome challenged Carthage; and after a prodigious struggle, which lasted to within two hundred years of the birth of Our Lord, ruined the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town itself was destroyed by the Romans, and its territory turned into a Roman province. So perished for many hundred years the dangerous illusion that the merchant can master the soldier. But never had that illusion seemed nearer to the truth than at certain moments in the duel between Carthage and Rome.
The main consequence of this success was that, by the nature of the struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its City States, with its half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on the plateau of Spain behind the cities of the littoral, the corresponding belt of Southern France, and the cultivated land of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system, and became, but in a more united way, what Italy had already long before become. The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, the Roman confederation, with its ideas of law and government, was supreme in the Western Mediterranean and was compelled by its geographical position to extend itself inland further and further into Spain, and even (what was to be of prodigious consequence to the world) into GAUL.
But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul we must notice that in the hundred years after the final fall of Carthage, the Eastern Mediterranean had also begun to come into line. This Western power, the Roman, thus finally established, occupied Corinth in the same decade as that which saw the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once been Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or Grecian East—Syria, Egypt—followed. The Macedonian power in its provinces came to depend upon the Roman system in a series of protectorates, annexations, and occupations, which two generations or so before the foundation of the Catholic Church had made Rome, though her system was not yet complete, the centre of the whole Mediterranean world. The men whose sons lived to be contemporary with the Nativity saw that the unity of that world was already achieved. The World was now one, and was built up of the islands, the peninsulas, and the littoral of the Inland Sea.
So the Empire might have remained, and so one would think it naturally would have remained, a Mediterranean thing, but for that capital experiment which has determined all future history—Julius Cæsar's conquest of Gaul—Gaul, the mass of which lay North, Continental, exterior to the Mediterranean: Gaul which linked up with the Atlantic and the North Sea: Gaul which lived by the tides: Gaul which was to be the foundation of things to come.
It was this experiment—the Roman Conquest of Gaul—and its success which opened the ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and completeness has no parallel. Something less than a hundred small Celtic States, partially civilized (but that in no degree comparable to the high life of the Mediterranean), were occupied, taught, and, as it were, "converted" into citizens of this now united Roman civilization.
It was all done, so to speak, within the lifetime of a man. The link and corner-stone of Western Europe, the quadrilateral which lies between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Channel, accepted civilization in a manner so final and so immediate that no historian has ever quite been able to explain the phenomenon. Gaul accepted almost at once the Roman language, the Roman food, the Roman dress, and it formed the first—and a gigantic—extension of European culture.
We shall later find Gaul providing the permanent and enduring example of that culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay. Gaul led to Britain. The Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest struggle which any territory had presented, was also incorporated. By the close of the first century after the Incarnation, when the Catholic Church had already been obscurely founded in many a city, and the turn of the world's history had come, the Roman Empire was finally established in its entirety. By that time, from the Syrian Desert to the Atlantic, from the Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay a secure and unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great State.
This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the Church was to be sown. As the religion of this State the Catholic Church was to develop. This State is still present, underlying our apparently complex political arrangements, as the main rocks of a country underlie the drift of the surface. Its institutions of property and of marriage; its conceptions of law; its literary roots of Rhetoric, of Poetry, of Logic, are still the stuff of Europe. The religion which it made as universal as itself is still, and perhaps more notably than ever, apparent to all.
II
WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?
So