If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1500 miles apart, in the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled by the vigour of the western mind between Augustus and Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State what is even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and uniformity the orders of those emperors who seem to us the lessening despots of a failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates, to be obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the Rome of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets, but something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a figure with one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading ocean. Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the sound of three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do. “Telle que dans son char la Bérycynthienne Couronnée de tours, et heureuse d’avoir Enfanté tant de dieux....” This was the might and the permanence from which we sprang. To establish the character of the Empire and its creative mission is the less easy from the prejudice that has so long existed against the action of religion, and especially of that religion which the Empire embraced as its cataclysm approached. The acceptation of the creed is associated in every mind with the eclipse of knowledge and with a contempt for the delights which every mind now seeks. It is often thought the cause, always the companion, of decay, and so far has this sentiment proceeded that in reading books upon Augustine or upon Athanasius one might forget by what a sea and under what a sunlight the vast revolution was effected.