But one thing the Church could construct and conserve--the fabric of her own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so, inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of the western towns which survived and propagated their species through the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern civilisation derived. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 398: See E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 703; cp. A. Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The reversion of the remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language of the common people, under stress of strife with Etruria, is a phenomenon on all fours with the abandonment of French by the upper-class English in the fourteenth century, as a result of hostility with France.] [Footnote 399: Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fashion (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to shape a culture for itself, to energise independently and creatively in the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science"--this after expressly noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only under the stimulus of alien culture. Compare §§ 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).] [Footnote 400: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300 (bk. i, ch. xv).] [Footnote 401: "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon," observes M. Boissier, while noting the slightness of the characterisation (_La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, 4e édition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would seem to have encouraged multiplication.]