Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/532

 52G MUNICIPAL REGIME DISAPPEARS. BOOK V.. It separates what all antiquity had confounded. We may lemaik, moreover, that duiing three centuries the new religion lived entirely beyond the action of the state; it knew how to dispense with state protection,, and even to struggle against it. These three centuries established an abyss between the domain of the gov- ernment and the domain of religion ; and, as the recol- lection of this period could not be effaced, it followed that this distinction became a plain and incontestable truth, which the efibrts even of a part of the clergy could not eradicate. This principle was fertile in great results. On one hand, politics became definitively freed from the strict rules which the ancient religion had traced, and could govern men without having to bend to sacred usages, without consulting the auspices or the oracles, without conforming all acts to the beliefs and requirements of a worship. Political action was freer ; no other authority tliau that of the moral law now impeded it. On the other hand, if the state was more comj^letely master in certain things, its action was also more limited. A complete half of man had been freed from its control. Christianity taught that only a part of man belonged to society ; that he was bound to it by his body and by his material interests; that when subject to a tyrant, it was his duty to submit ; that as a citizen of a republic,, he ought to give his life for it, but that, in what re- lated to his soul, he was free, and was bound only to God. Stoicism had already marked this separation; it had restored man to himself, and had founded liberty of conscience. But that which was merely the effort of the energy of a courageous sect, Christianity made a universal and unchangeable rule for succeeding genera-