" Hence the growth of Christianity was
slow in those western parts of the Empire that had not come under the
influence of Greek culture--Gaul, Britain, Spain, North Africa. Latin
Christianity found its centre in North Africa, where Roman culture had
imposed itself on the hard, cruel Carthaginian world. It is Carthage,
not Athens, that gives to Tertullian his harsh intolerance and to St
Augustine his stern determinism. So the way was prepared for what I
regard as the supreme tragedy of history--the falling apart of Eastern
and Western Christianity. Then, in the West, the unity of the Church is
broken by the conversion of the Teutonic peoples to Arianism, so that
the contest between the dying Empire in the West and the tribes pressing
on its frontiers is embittered by religious antagonism. The sword of
Clovis secured the victory of orthodoxy, but at what a cost!
When the storm subsides, there emerges the august conception of the Holy
Roman Empire. For the noblest expression of the ideal of a universal
Christian Empire, read Dante's _De Monarchia_. The history of the Holy
Roman Empire is too large a subject to enter upon.
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