After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.
Daniel 7:7
"Historian Will Durant writes of Daniel’s
fourth beast:
“When Christianity conquered Rome,
the ecclesiastical
structure of the pagan church,
the title and vestments of the Pontifex
Maximus,
the worship of the Great Mother goddess
and a multitude of
comforting divinities …
the joy and solemnity of old festivals,
and the
pageantry of immemorial ceremony,
passed like maternal blood into the
new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror.
The reigns and
skills of government were handed down by a dying 
empire to a virile
Papacy.
The lost power of the broken sword was reclaimed by the magic of
the consoling word.
The armies of the state were replaced by the
missionaries of the church, moving in all directions along the Roman
roads, and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again
acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome.
The church, with the shadow of
ancient authority behind it, was the only symbol left of imperial Rome.
Its bishop, the pope of Rome, was the city’s only recourse for
leadership and protection.
The Roman Empire in Europe would be replaced
by the spiritual empire, which came to be temporal as well, whose
reigning seigneur was the bishop of Rome” (Caesar and Christ, page 672)."
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