Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and the multitude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in politics. After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory of Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at Tours,[427] fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent as government. As we read Augustine's _City of God_, with its strenuous demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns, then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy, but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst."[428]