In the brilliant argument which Belloc makes in _Europe and the Faith_ to prove that “the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization,” he goes so far as to maintain that “the divisions and subdivisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the routes of communication between them ... all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.” He finds in the Church of Rome the medium through which this inheritance has been transmitted. With this Catholic essayist the Protestant historian, Harnack, is in substantial agreement when he writes: “The Empire has not perished, but has only undergone a transformation.... The Roman Church is the old Roman Empire consecrated by the Gospel.” Before we take up for consideration certain points of resemblance and of difference between our political institutions and those of ancient Rome, it is interesting to stop for a moment to ask ourselves in what respects the tradition and the ideals of the Roman state have been perpetuated by the Church of Rome. In the first place the Church is the lineal successor of the Empire in the sense that she saved Europe from chaos when the political ties which bound its several component parts to Rome were severed, and she conserved with all her power through the Middle Ages the Roman elements which escaped being engulfed by the wave of barbarism. More than that, she kept alive the old tradition of world-empire, no longer of the flesh, but of the spirit. Like the old Empire her domain embraced diverse lands and peoples. She resembled and she resembles the Empire now in the fact that she follows law and tradition strictly. She requires implicit obedience from the individual, and the interests of the individual are subordinated to those of the organization. In all these characteristics she is the true spiritual daughter of the Roman Empire. We noticed a moment ago that the realm of the Church, like that of the Emperor, included many different lands. The territorial parallelism between the two systems goes beyond this general point of resemblance.