Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean success. We admire almost with awe its unsparing thoroughness, its austerity, its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance. In its later forms, when some power has touched it with gentleness, we yield it even a warmer and tenderer admiration. Only what we cannot do is to disguise its failure as a great spiritual experiment. We cannot forget how it left the mass of men untouched, how it concentrated strength by what it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how it revealed a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not cure: how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to give peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an inspiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot be blind to its failure unless we share it: unless, that is, we are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment of moral self-reliance, then, failed in its turn. But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to all this Gentile history: a positive contribution to the preparation for Christ. Where shall we look for this? Surely alongside of, and in the same plane with, the failures. If one chief result of the history of the ancient world was to exhibit the insufficiency of man's efforts to find truth and righteousness and life, this must be completely shewn in proportion as the efforts were noble, and therefore in proportion as they realized (though, at the moment, only for disappointment) the capacities, the possibilities, the true desires and ideals of man. If man the race, like man the individual, was finally to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own natural man, he could only do this when it had been adequately and magnificently proved both that he could not save himself, and how splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that he may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome? They are splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their method, they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, conditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dignity, its honour, its strength. Perhaps, according to the one-sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of men, it