From the time named, the Roman Primacy is the one sole fixed point in the West. All else is fluctuating and transitional. To the Pope the bishops, subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling,--with him and in him they are Catholic. Let me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact. The Church, says Guizot, "at the commencement of the fifth century, had its government, a body of clergy, a hierarchy, which apportioned the different functions of the clergy, revenues, independent means of action, rallying points which suit a great society, councils provincial, national, general, the habit of arranging in common the society's affairs. In a word, at this epoch Christianity was not only a religion but a Church. If it had not been a Church, I do not know what would have become of it in the midst of the Roman empire's fall. I confine myself to purely human considerations: I put aside every element foreign to the natural consequences of natural facts. If Christianity had only been a belief, a feeling, an individual conviction, we may suppose that it would have broken down at the dissolution of the empire and the barbarian invasion. It did break down later in Asia and in all north Africa beneath an invasion of the same kind--that of barbarous Mussulmans. It broke down then though it was an institution, a constituted Church. Much more might the same fact have happened at the moment of the Roman empire's fall. There were then none of those means by which in the present day moral influences are established or support themselves independent of institutions: no means by which a naked truth, a naked idea, acquires a great power over minds, rules actions, and determines events. Nothing of the kind existed in the fourth century to invest ideas and personal feelings with such an authority. It is clear that a strongly organised, a strongly governed, society was needed to struggle against so great a disaster, to overcome such a hurricane. I think I do not go too far in affirming that, at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century, it is the Christian Church which saved Christianity. It is the Church, with its institutions, its magistrates, and its power, which offered a vigorous defence to the internal dissolution of the empire, to barbarism; which conquered the barbarians; which became the bond, the means, the principle of civilisation to the Roman and the barbarian world."[27]