Tradition 13
any such visible center around which the world has gathered.
But the fascination of Roman tradition has revived again.
Having slumbered for centuries it roused itself and inspired
the national consciousness two generations ago, and more
recently and possibly more intensely it has appealed to the
Fascists. Fascism, due indeed to the dominating personal-
ity of Mussolini, has found no little strength in his call to
the people of Italy to remember that once all roads led to
Rome, and to recover for her again her agelong position
as a leader of the world.
The universality of the Roman tradition, however, ap-
pears not in Fascism but in the Church of Rome. In some
aspects this ecumenical institution has been the most endur-
ing as well as the most representative outcome of the Im-
perial spirit. When with the break-up of the Empire
Roman civilization began to decay, and when otherwise
there might have been chaos, the Roman Church by its
codified and authoritative tradition conserved, through
standing for peace and order, much of the old civilization.
Law generates a conservative type of mind, and when it
constitutes part of the framework of an institution of re-
ligion, the tradition embodied in it comes to be regarded as
so sacred that none may without sacrilege modify even
slightly its structure. Tradition hardens into law; law is
also a deposit of practice ; dogma adds its divine authority.
Though a variety of factors entered into the manifold
movement that made breaches in this Roman tradition in
the sixteenth century, in the Reformation “the real chal-
lenge was the challenge to the Latinism of the Roman
Church, domiciled in Italy.”1 The rising Teutonic nation-
ɪ Barker, The Modern Churchman xxiil 336.
A few years ago an English scholar in a Scottish University, who had
joined the Roman Church, took the opportunity of transferring from his Greek
chair to a vacant one in Latin. One of his friends explained to me that he
found the literature and history of Rome more fundamental in his new reli-
gious faith, and more congenial to his temper.