It is thus that Revelation fathoms the deep mystery of death--that it brings before us man and the purpose of his being. Guided then by the clear light it radiates, we can walk amid the darkness which enshrouds the fate of nations, and gather even from their silent ruins the true cause of their extinction. More crowded is the catalogue of buried than of living generations! The records of departed States and Empires--the time-worn monuments of former strength and grandeur--the disjointed fragments of a once unbroken whole,--each, all, are eloquent around us! Why is it we can gaze on nothing permanent? Why is it that we stand the beings of a universe which Change is ever wasting? Why is it that innumerable nations of the earth, in the midst of all their beauty and magnificence, are stricken down for ever, and the place they occupied left desolate? Is their fate without an object? Is their influence unfelt? Is it chance that rules their destiny? One of the earliest theories respecting the progress of society, has been the regular tendency of our race to decline and degradation. This theory, the result partly of tradition and partly of poetic fancy, carries back the mind to a golden age of primeval excellence, and represents the progress of mankind as a continual departure from a higher and a better state of being. Those occasional exhibitions of lofty virtue and of noble self-devotion which mark the establishment of new States and Empires,--the stern integrity of Regulus,--the high-souled magnanimity of Fabricius,--it regards only as the ineffectual struggles of exalted minds to check the downward tendency of our race, and as swept away by the resistless current of human corruption. This theory was transmitted even from remote antiquity,--interwoven with the superstitions of that early time, strengthened by the implicit confidence of each successive age, and destined to exist till that religion of which it was the offspring, should be crushed beneath the wider and the nobler system of Christianity. It was too a theory interesting and attractive,--well adapted to the age of its formation. It dealt much in the ideal. Its conceptions were those of poetry, mournful indeed, but beautiful and alluring. It spoke of an elevated state of being from which man had fallen,--of a grandeur, every trace of which was then effaced,--of a beauty which had long since faded. It told of nobler aspirations that had fired the soul,--of loftier communings of the spirit with the world above,--of thoughts unbounded in their range, whose center was the universe. It breathed of a quiet and a happy era,--of a peace beyond all trouble,--of an innocence without a stain. It hurried its votaries away from the earth that met their vision, to the brighter one of its creation--a land beautiful beyond conception--the Elysium of gods and the residence of heroes. It was all that the genius of Paganism could do to linger around the visions of departed greatness.