to share in the office of Christian priesthood; when Dante gave his genius to show that the growth of the Roman power was the special work of God, and that the head of the Roman power was, in all things earthly, God’s immediate Vicar upon earth. A theory, it may be said, which no age saw in practice. Truly so, and chiefly because the power of Rome split asunder, because the inheritance of her Cæsar was disputed between a prince by the Bosporos and a prince by the Rhine. Those days are still far from us; we shall reach them in the course of our story; it is enough here to say that the very cleaving to Roman titles and traditions on the part of powers from which all that was truly Roman had passed away was in truth the most speaking witness to the deep and lasting impress on men’s minds which had been won for the teaching that it was for Rome, and for Rome alone, to rule and judge the nations. * * * * * The change from the commonwealth to the Empire of Rome was in truth a gradual process by which a single citizen of Rome, charged with a special commission, allowed to unite offices and powers which were designed to act as checks on one another, changed, step by step, first into a practical, and then into an acknowledged, master of Rome and of all that obeyed Rome. That change, so strikingly analogous to the gradual process by which Rome herself changed from influence to dominion, is, in our œcumenical survey, of far less direct moment than it is in the constitutional history of Rome herself. We have to deal with the œcumenical headship of Rome, whatever form the government of Rome herself may take. But the indirect œcumenical results of the change from commonwealth to Empire were vast indeed. To the Roman city the change was political death; to the provinces it was the beginning of a new life. Under the Empire, not only were many practical grievances lessened in the subject lands, but the process of fusion between the subject lands and the ruling city went on with far greater speed than it could go on as long as the Roman city was engaged in the vain task of striving to unite _libertas_ at home with _imperium_ in other lands. The _Imperator_ came because the _imperium_ was there to call for him, because for the subject lands one master was less grievous than many. It was not without good reason that the provincials raised their altars to more than one prince for whom the citizens, also not without good reason, sharpened their daggers. Under the Empire, families, cities, whole lands among the provinces, were admitted, one by one, to the full rights of Romans. At last the decree went forth of which we have already spoken, the decree which gave to all of them the rights, or at least the name, of Romans. From that day, most fully in the West, more fully perhaps than we fancy even in the East, an artificial nation grew up, a nation with its blood mingled with the blood of