Latin Christianity cannot altogether be classed as a later stage than Greek Christianity. It was to a large extent a concurrent development. As far as its theological features were concerned, it was little more than the uncritical acceptance of dogmas worked out by the Greeks. But, eventually, the distinctive gifts of the Latin race asserted themselves and those races which had built up the Roman Empire, or as subjects of it had become embued with its spirit, applied their organizing genius to the Christian Church and moulded the Church of the West into a replica of the Empire, and in such closely-knit fashion that, when under its own inherent weaknesses and through the irruption of the northern barbarians, that mightiest of all organizations of antiquity collapsed, the Church that came eventually and fittingly to know itself as Roman took its place and proved itself an even mightier organization, subduing restless and fierce peoples on which Imperial Rome had never been able to impose her yoke. The Latin mind, then, with its reverence for order and law, its genius for government, its detestation of lawless individualism, discerned the possibilities of the Christian Church as an organization, and out of the simple piety of Jesus and the reasoned theology of the Greeks fashioned the mightiest instrument of discipline and order the world has ever seen. Here, again, there may be a protest. This Latinization, or imperialization, of Christianity may be indignantly termed a perversion rather than a development. This only need be said in reply, that it would be difficult for anyone who has studied, without prejudice, the period between the overthrow of the Western Empire and the Protestant Reformation to deny the providential character of Latin Christianity. No other form of Christianity has as yet rendered so great a service to the race. It is questionable whether any other form of Christianity, even if it had been in existence, could at that stage have rendered so great a service. It was precisely those features in the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards her people which are most uncongenial to the Protestant temper which were the disciplinary agencies needed by the lawless, seething Europe of the Dark Ages to qualify it for the personal liberty the vindication of which has been the faith and service of Protestantism. 4. Teutonic Christianity.