the theme
of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a
scroll. Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a
procession of empires--Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,
and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of
Charlemagne and of the Othos. Their successive falls point to man's
obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of
the Judgment.

The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[4] and of the Cardinal
Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century
Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive
and finished than that of Augustine himself. In recent times this
theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and
Carlyle. It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, _The
Stones of Venice_. The value of that work is imperishable, because the
documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and
sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison. Yet its
philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,
and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master. The
bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever
permitted himself to imagine. In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates
the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is
that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era
lies the salvation of England. Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its
great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of
the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of
Christianism of which that standard was the emblem. But in the
sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the
consequence.

In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State
identical with that indicated in the second lecture. They exhibit the
effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a
design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or
ought to be. Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty
aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind
assaults of fate and man. In individual life, therefore, the primitive
conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life
of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the
succession of