The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name, and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the first element in that standing “Council of Great Men” which was the mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official, imperial, absolute, local power. There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else, power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop. Throughout Western Europe at that moment men’s interest and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion. The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A.D.). The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for “creed” he will read “capital,” and for the “Faith,” “industrial civilization.” For just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the _unity_ and _exactitude_ of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to _this_ they sank all other things.