Modern civilization owes its superiority to the growth of equality with
the growth of association. Two great causes contributed to this--the
splitting up of concentrated power into innumerable little centers by
the influx of the Northern nations, and the influence of Christianity.
Without the first there would have been the petrifaction and slow decay
of the Eastern Empire, where church and state were closely married and
loss of external power brought no relief of internal tyranny. And but
for the other there would have been barbarism without principle of
association or amelioration. The petty chiefs and allodial lords who
everywhere grasped local sovereignty held each other in check. Italian
cities recovered their ancient liberty, free towns were founded, village
communities took root, and serfs acquired rights in the soil they
tilled. The leaven of Teutonic ideas of equality worked through the
disorganized and disjointed fabric of society. And although society was
split up into an innumerable number of separated fragments, yet the idea
of closer association was always present--it existed in the
recollections of a universal empire; it existed in the claims of a
universal church.

Though Christianity became distorted and alloyed in percolating through
a rotting civilization; though pagan gods were taken into her pantheon,
and pagan forms into her ritual, and pagan ideas into her creed; yet her
essential idea of the equality of men was never wholly destroyed. And
two things happened of the utmost moment to incipient civilization--the
establishment of the papacy and the celibacy of the clergy. The first
prevented the spiritual power from concentrating in the same lines as
the temporal power; and the latter prevented the establishment of a
priestly caste, during a time when all power tended to hereditary form.

In her efforts for the abolition of slavery; in her Truce of God; in her