It consisted with the universal intellectual decadence that neither the pagans nor the Christians realized the nature of either the religious or the political evolution. The former regarded the new faith as a blasphemy which had brought on the empire the ruinous wrath of the Gods; the latter called the barbaric invasion a divine punishment both of pagan and Christian wickedness, and saw in the decline of all pagan worship the defeat of a false faith by a true. Neither had the slightest perception of the real and human causation; the degradation of the peoples by the yoke of Rome; the economic ruin and moral paralysis of Rome by sheer empire: and as little could they realize that the fortunes of the creeds were natural socio-political sequences. What had ecclesiastically happened was essentially an economic process, albeit one set up by a religious credence. Paganism as a public system disappeared because it was deprived of all its revenues; Christianity as a system finally flourished because the church was legally empowered to receive donations and legacies without limit, and debarred from parting with any of its property. Any corporation whatever, any creed whatever, would have flourished on such a basis; while only a priesthood capable of building up a voluntary revenue as the Christian church had originally done could survive on pagan lines after the Christian creed had been established. The pagan priesthoods, originally generated on a totally different footing, could not learn the economic lesson, could not readjust themselves to a process which, as we have seen, originated in conditions of fanatical nonconformity, which latter-day paganism could not reproduce. But so far were the mental habitudes and the specific beliefs of paganism from disappearing that Christian historians in our own day bitterly denounce it for "infecting" their "revealed" creed, which in the terms of their claim was divinely designed to overthrow paganism, and which would assuredly have rent itself into a medley of reciprocally anathematizing sects but for the unifying coercion of the State. What had really died out on the "spiritual" side was the primitive ideal of the Christian Church. What survived as Christianity was really an idolatrous polytheism. CHAPTER III FAILURE WITH SURVIVAL § 1. The Overthrow of Arianism