The genuine capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from the first in the New Testament, was also really at work, in that earlier "Peace," under [118] the Antonines--the minor "Peace of the church," as we might call it, in distinction from the final "Peace of the church," commonly so called, under Constantine.

Saint Francis, with his following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts--the voice of Dante, the hand of Giotto--giving visible feature and colour, and a palpable place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish a continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening centuries--the "dark ages," properly thus named--with the gracious spirit of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early springtide of her success.

The greater "Peace" of Constantine, on the other hand, in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the puritanism, the ascetic gloom which, in the period between Aurelius and the first Christian emperor, characterised a church under misunderstanding or oppression, driven back, in a world of tasteless controversy, inwards upon herself.
Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and with all the disturbing results of such a crisis.

At this period the larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with peaceful hearts in their "Father's house." That earlier belief in the speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the consequences it so naturally involved in the temper [119] of men's minds, was dying out.

Every day the contrast between the church and the world was becoming less pronounced.