Unquestionably I understand and share the indignation of sincere liberals against a government which diffused a frightful despotism over the world. But is it our fault that the wants of humanity are diverse, its aspirations manifold, its aims contradictory? Politics is not every thing here below. What the world desired, after those frightful butcheries of the earlier centuries, was gentleness, humanity. They had enough of heroism: those vigorous goddesses, eternally brandishing their spears on the height of the Acropolis, inspired sentiment no longer. The earth, as in the time of Cadmus, had swallowed her most noble sons. The proud Grecian races had killed each other. The Peloponessus was a desert. The sweet voice of Virgil gently took up the cry of humanity, peace, pity! The establishment of Christianity responded to this cry of all tender and weary souls. Christianity could only have had birth and expansion in a time when there were no longer free cities. If there was any thing totally lacking in the founders of the Church, it was patriotism. They were not cosmopolites, for the entire planet was to them a place of exile: they were idealists in the most absolute sense. A country is a composition of soul and body. The soul is the souvenirs, the legends, the customs, the misfortunes, the hopes, the common sorrows: the body is the soil, the race, the language, the mountains, the rivers, the characteristic productions. Now, was a people ever more wanting in all this than the first Christians? They did not cling to Judæa; after a few years they had forgotten Galilee; the glory of Greece and Rome was indifferent to them. The countries in which Christianity was first established--Syria, Cyprus, and Asia Minor--no longer remembered the time when they were free. Greece and Rome, it is true, still had a grand national sentiment. At Rome, patriotism survived in a few families; in Greece, Christianity flourished only at Corinth,--a city which, since its destruction by Mummius, and its reconstruction by Cæsar, was the resort of men of all races. The true Greek countries, then, as to-day, very jealous, very much absorbed in the memories of their past, gave little countenance to the new doctrines: they were always lukewarm Christians. On the contrary, those gay, indolent, voluptuous countries of Asia and Syria, countries of pleasure, of free manners, _de laisser aller_, accustomed to receive life and government from others, had nothing to resign in the way of pride and traditions. The most ancient capitals of Christianity--Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Rome--were common cities, so to speak, cities of the modern type of Alexandria, in which all races met, where that marriage between man and the soil, which constitutes a nation, was absolutely broken.