monastic orders; in her councils which united nations, and her edicts
which ran without regard to political boundaries; in the low-born hands
in which she placed a sign before which the proudest knelt; in her
bishops who by consecration became the peers of the greatest nobles; in
her "Servant of Servants," for so his official title ran, who, by virtue
of the ring of a simple fisherman, claimed the right to arbitrate
between nations, and whose stirrup was held by kings; the Church, in
spite of everything, was yet a promoter of association, a witness for
the natural equality of men; and by the Church herself was nurtured a
spirit that, when her early work of association and emancipation was
well-nigh done--when the ties she had knit had become strong, and the
learning she had preserved had been given to the world--broke the chains
with which she would have fettered the human mind, and in a great part
of Europe rent her organization.

The rise and growth of European civilization is too vast and complex a
subject to be thrown into proper perspective and relation in a few
paragraphs; but in all its details, as in its main features, it
illustrates the truth that progress goes on just as society tends toward
closer association and greater equality. Civilization is co-operation.
Union and liberty are its factors. The great extension of
association--not alone in the growth of larger and denser communities,
but in the increase of commerce and the manifold exchanges which knit
each community together and link them with other though widely separated
communities; the growth of international and municipal law; the advances
in security of property and of person, in individual liberty, and
towards democratic government--advances, in short, towards the
recognition of the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness--it is these that make our modern civilization so much
greater, so much higher, than any that has gone before. It is these that