Note 96 — Chapter VI · FREETHOUGHT IN ANCIENT ROME

For the rest, the “triumph” of the new faith was simply the survival of the forms of thought, and, above all, of the form of religious community, best fitted to the political and intellectual environment. The new Church organization was above all things a great economic endowment for a class of preachers, polemists, and propagandists; and between the closing of the old spheres of public life and the opening of the new,96 the new faith was established as much by political and economic conditions as by its intellectual adaptation to an age of mental twilight.