[Cicero]

Far be it from Cicero to deprecate the Romans. You would think that after a couple of centuries of persecution Christianity would have turned against Rome, but paradoxically after the conversion of Constantine Rome and Christianity converged. The vision of Roman law and Roman order was kept alive all through the middle ages and the Renaissance by Christians.

[qam1]

I don't know about that. If anything Christianity was a bad thing for the Roman Empire. It exsisted 1000+ relativity prosporous years before Christianity (Ok some ups & downs here and there but overall they did good) and after it converted only ~60 later it fell apart and broke in 2 and after ~170 years the barbarians were at the gates and it was finished. Though yes there was The Holy Roman empire afterwards but that was a triple misnomer (It wasn't Holy, It wasn't Roman and it sure as hell wasn't an empire).
Afterwards you had the Divine rights of kings and the feudal system and the dark ages decended upon men like an Iron curtain. Ok wrong century but the result was the same in that it deprived ordinary men of freedom. It wasn't until the renaissance and the age of exploration when people started to break away against the false teachings of the bible (i.e Earth is Flat, The Sun Goes around the earth, Pi equals 3 exactly not 3.14159...) that man started to yearn for and eventually acheive freedom again.