ts abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,
influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall
of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.

Sec. 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?

Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the
cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth
and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that
the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be
averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified. The
mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall
endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.
He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the
government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.
And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still
proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.

But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or
surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the
passing of youth. Man might as well start once more to discover the
elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that
shall not pass away.

To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like
pondering too curiously the question why a man dies. In the
vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as
in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life. The tracts and
regions governed by cause and effect are behind us. An empire, like a
work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an
integral portion or phase of that end. From the concept, "Empire,"
duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in
the concept itself. Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are
alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself
through the individual in the State. The curve of an empire's history
is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes. It is a portion of
the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades
analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul
which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.

Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of
a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to
the heart's desire, is vain enough. The