A dynamic law requires that two masses -- nature and man --
must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun
and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of
stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather
than deficiency, of action and reaction to account for the
dissolution of the Roman Empire, which should, as a problem of
mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the
student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he
must assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the
trouble; and in this case he has them in plain evidence. With the
relentless logic that stamped Roman thought, the empire, which
had established unity on earth, could not help establishing unity
in heaven. It was induced by its dynamic necessities to economize
the gods.
The Church has never ceased to protest against the charge that
Christianity ruined the empire, and, with its usual force, has
pointed out that its reforms alone saved the State. Any dynamic
theory gladly admits it. All it asks is to find and follow the
force that attracts. The Church points out this force in the
Cross, and history needs only to follow it. The empire loudly
asserted its motive. Good taste forbids saying that Constantine
the Great speculated as audaciously as a modern stock-broker on
values of which he knew at the utmost only the volume; or that he
merged all uncertain forces into a single trust, which he
enormously overcapitalized, and forced on the market; but this is
the substance of what Constantine himself said in his Edict of
Milan in the year 313, which admitted Christianity into the Trust
of State Religions.
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