The crowning achievement of a Christian civilization will be the political regeneration of the nations--the establishment of all human governments on the principles of human equality, natural rights, and the brotherhood of man. The glory of this achievement, in all its fullness, is not, however, the work of Europe. She inherits too positively the martial spirit of Ancient Rome. Ancient customs and prescriptions, hereditary castes, aristocracies, and kings, and an ecclesiastical polity moulded by these, stand in the way of a Christianity of equality, of freedom, and of universal brotherhood. Europe has her roots too deeply infixed in the past to adapt herself, fully and readily, to the enlarged principles of a thoroughly Christian civilization. A new country is therefore needed, a _New World_, where Christianity can remodel human society, and reconstruct human governments upon her own principles, and the human race can enter upon the last stage in its progress toward the now visible portals of its final goal. "The East," says Ritter, "represents _hope_, the West, _fulfillment_." That new continent was discovered just at the proper hour. Had North America been discovered earlier, it would have been peopled by Catholic nations, and the noble civilization which Christianity was designed to achieve would have been cramped and fettered by the hand of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The New World reposed quietly in the bosom of a yet untraversed ocean awaiting the advent of the Protestant Reformation. Luther drew the Bible from its concealment in the library of the University of Erfurt at the same time (1502) that Columbus discovered the American continent.[403]