Now Christianity was a profound and radical innovation. Never had the supremacy of the ruler or the State been questioned before the Apostles proclaimed the Creed in “One Holy Catholic Church,” destined to transcend all natural and political boundaries, without distinction of class or colour. Not less radical was the second innovation, a necessary corollary of the first, viz. the ecclesiastical autonomy and independence of the new spiritual society or Church, one, Catholic. “Never,” writes J. B. Martineau, “until the Church arose did faith undertake the conquest alone, and triumph over diversities of speech and antipathies of race.” But Paganism, with its system of state absolutism in spiritual as well as in temporal matters, has never accepted its defeat by the Catholic Church, a spiritual, autonomous society, distinct from the State. The tale of Byzantine heresies, from the fourth to the eighth century, were all efforts of each successive Emperor of Constantinople to shake off the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and be again the Pontifex Maximus of his dominions. The long struggle of the Investitures, the Constitutions of Clarendon, statutes of Præmunire, State Gallicanism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1792, Josephism in Austria, the Kultur-Kampf laws in Germany and Switzerland, 1870-76 were all episodes of this struggle, between the new dispensation and the ancient system of national religions under state supremacy. In the sixteenth century there was a vast renaissance of this latter system in a new dress called Erastianism. Lord Clarendon declared that this spiritual supremacy of rulers was “the better moiety of their sovereignty.” The old pagan, or Erastian system, triumphed in the eastern empire with the Schism of Photius, in Russia under Peter the Great, in England under Elizabeth, in all the Protestant States of northern Europe.