But as time went over him in his new position two things made themselves felt. One was, that though there was a New Testament life, lived in the Roman Church with conspicuous truth and reality, yet the Roman Church, like the English, was administered and governed by men--men with passions and faults, men of mixed characters--who had, like their English contemporaries and rivals, ends and rules of action not exactly like those of the New Testament. The Roman Church had to accept, as much as the English, the modern conditions of social and political life, however different in outward look from those of the Sermon on the Mount. The other was the increasing sense that the civilisation of the West was as a whole, and notwithstanding grievous drawbacks, part of God's providential government, a noble and beneficent thing, ministering graciously to man's peace and order, which Christians ought to recognise as a blessing of their times such as their fathers had not, for which they ought to be thankful, and which, if they were wise, they would put to what, in his phrase, was an "Apostolical" use. In one of the angelical hymns in the _Dream of Gerontius_, he dwells on the Divine goodness which led men to found "a household and a fatherland, a city and a state" with an earnestness of sympathy, recalling the enumeration of the achievements of human thought and hand, and the arts of civil and social life--[Greek: kai phthegma kai aenemoen phronaema kai astynomous orgas]--dwelt on so fondly by Aeschylus and Sophocles.