The problem is to render possible and reconcile the coexistence of the largest private liberty and the highest public authority. This implies the idea of _mediation_. There must be _mediatizing_ institutions standing between the state and the individual, insuring the safe transmission of power, and guaranteeing justice between the state and individuals, as well as between individuals in their relations with each other. This done, you realize or actualize the grand idea of mediation in the political relations of men. The distinguishing idea of Christianity--the God-man reconciling man with God, and thus harmonizing the finite with the infinite--this idea must actualize itself in the affairs of men, in order to harmonize perfect liberty with salutary authority. Animated by this idea, penetrated with profoundest belief of the infinite worth of the individual man because the God-man had wonderfully renewed his nature, the early Christian heroes and martyrs took hold of the hostile and disorganized elements of European society--the fragments of the Roman empire on the one hand, and the barbarians of the north on the other--and brought order out of chaos. They re-organized society by naturally, though slowly, developing those numerous intermediary institutions--guilds, corporations, trial by jury, the judiciary, and representation of interests, orders, guilds and corporations, _not of individual heads_, in Parliament--all which, as a living, harmonious system, constitute, or _did_ constitute, the English Constitution, and were essentially reproduced in the Constitution of the United States, and which wonderfully distinguish constitutionalism from absolutism. 'The will of the emperor has the force of law,' was the fundamental maxim of the civil law. Emperor, imperator;--hence, imperialism, Caesarism, absolutism. That maxim obtained with pagans--civilized it may be, but none the less pagans--whose theory or gospel was that 'man is his own end.' Man's infinite moral worth as man, was not known or not recognized in the pagan civilization of the classic Greeks and Romans. Hence the state, which outlived the individual, was of more importance than the individual, and naturally absorbed the individual. Man being his own end, and existence being next to impossible without society, the state was the best means to obtain his end, and therefore Plato taught that man lives for the state, must be trained up for the state, belongs to the state, and is of no value outside of the state. Hence the pagan civilization of Greece and Rome, being intensely human, while it became very splendid and refined, became also, and could not help becoming intensely and unutterably corrupt--so corrupt that St. Paul refrained from finishing the disgusting catalogue of its awful sins and vices. The church, Christianity, could save _man_, but it could not save the _empire_. The principle of social harmony being lost, government and society fell to pieces.