which the history of
the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides
itself. A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a
consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations
of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.

The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal. The European of that
age is a visionary. The unseen world is to him more real than the
seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the
soul from earth to heaven. The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw
night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining
battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the
world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and
Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times
looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but
phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.

But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of
the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour
is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable
pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,
his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the
ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in
accepted defeat or in formulated despair.

With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the _Wahn_ of religious
freedom. The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,
crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes--but shall not
the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the
pure faith of primitive times? When the last of the scholastics was
being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless
task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of
four centuries.

The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort
of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,
nearer to the truth. The successive phases of this struggle may be
compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and
setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,
the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and
Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,
learned the value of the word of a king. Martin