z:\ ambedkar\vol 08\vol8 03.indd MK SJ+YS 28 9 2013 192
192 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
It is, therefore, evident that political unity was not enough to give permanence and stability to the Roman Empire and as Bryce points out that “the breaking-up of the western half (of the Roman Empire) into separate kingdoms might have been anticipated by two hundred years, had the barbarian tribes on the border been bolder, or had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince, active and skilful enough to bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion, meeting altered conditions by new remedies”. But the fact is that the Roman Empire which was tottering and breaking into bits and whose political unity was not enough to bind it together did last for several hundred years as one cohesive unit after it became the Holy Roman Empire. As Prof. Marvin points out* :
“The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured for a thousand years.”
The question is what made the Holy Roman Empire more stable than the Roman Empire could ever hope to be ? According to Bryce it was a common religion in the shape of Christianity and a common religious organization in the shape of the Christian Church which supplied the cement to the Holy Roman Empire and which was wanting in the Roman Empire. It was this cement which gave to the people of the Empire a moral and social unity and made them see such unity expressed and realized under a single government.
Speaking of the unifying effect of Christianity as a common religion Bryce says :
“It is on religion that the inmost and deepest life of a nation rests. Because Divinity was divided, humanity had been divided, likewise ; the doctrine of the unity of God now enforced the unity of man, who had been created in His image. The first lesson of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom suspicion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, designed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold polytheisms of the older world, exactly as the universal sway
- The Unity of Western Civiliazation (4th Ed.,) p. 27.