It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that it destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created a demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the time other than Christianity supply the first. There is an attempt, or more than one attempt, to provide such a religion. There is the attempt by way of comprehension, of making all the gods live together as joint inhabitants of a common Pantheon. There is the attempt by way of construction, in the worship of the one Power about which there was no doubt, the Goddess Rome, and of the Emperor her deified representative. There is also, we may perhaps add, the attempt by way of philosophic thought. For philosophy at this time had a religious bent which increased not improbably as the circulation of Christian thought stole unknown through the veins of society: and it felt after the One Being whose Personal existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom yet it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order of nature. Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero's commonwealth of the Universe comprehending Gods and men, may be seen with increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius. The need of a universal religion is thus directly shewn. But other proofs, as clear though less direct, are to be drawn from the other departments of human thought. For literature was already a unity, into which whatever the genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, or Pliny contributed was gathered up. And it is a commonplace that the greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the creation or development of a universal code of law.