General and popular impressions about the character and course of the history will put us on the track of a true answer. It is impossible to look at the history of the classical world without getting a double impression, that it is a history of failure and degeneracy, and yet that it is a history of bettering and progress. If we take the world at the Christian era, the times of political brilliancy and energy are over, and men are sinking into a uniformity of servility and stagnation: morally the ancient severity is lost, and the laws of Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general dissoluteness as to morality and marriage: economically society is disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of honest and thriving free labour, and by great developments of luxury and pauperism: in literature, though it is the 'golden age,' the signs are not wanting, in artificiality and the excessive study of form, of imminent rapid decline into the later rhetorical culture: in philosophy speculation had run itself out into scepticism and self-destruction: and in religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt of all Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet there is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy which at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament: and their humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the limitations which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those of their greater predecessors.