The connection of such a political change with the success of the Christian enterprise, and with the perfect development and triumph of our peaceful faith, depends on the simple truth, that Christianity always flourishes best in the most highly civilized communities, and can never be so developed as to do full justice to its capabilities, in any state of society, short of the highest point of civilization. It never has been received, and held uncorrupt, by mere savages or wanderers; and it never can be. Thus and therefore it was, that wherever Roman conquest spread, and secured the lasting triumphs of civilization, thither Christianity followed, and flourished, as on a congenial soil, till at last not one land was left in the whole empire, where the eagle and the dove did not spread their wings in harmonious triumph. In all these lands, where Roman civilization prepared the way, Christian churches rose, and gathered within them the noble and the refined, as well as the humble and the poor. Spain, Gaul, Britain and Africa, as well as the ancient homes of knowledge, Egypt, Greece and Asia, are instances of this kind. And in every one of these, the reign of the true faith became coeval with civilization, yielding in some instances, it is true, on the advance of modern barbarism, but only when the Arabian prophet made them bow before his sword. Yet while within the pale of Roman conquest, Christianity supplanted polytheism, beyond that wide circle, heathenism remained long undisturbed, till the victorious march of the barbarian conquerors, over the empire of the Caesars, secured the extension of the gospel to them also;――the vanquished, in one sense, triumphing in turn over the victors, by making them the submissive subjects of Roman civilization, language, and religion;――so that, for the first five hundred years of the Christian era, the dominion of the Caesars was the most efficient earthly instrument for the extension of the faith. The persecution which the followers of the new faith occasionally suffered, were the results of aberrations from the general principles of tolerance, which characterized the religious policy of the empire; and after a few such acts of insane cruelty, the natural course of reaction brought the persecuted religion into fast increasing and finally universal favor.