ought. Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.

Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in
the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free. The
conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the
world. The individual will stands aside. The Will of the universe
advances. Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark
background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in
mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings
to this high, dread, and austere power.

So of empires, of races, and of nations. A race never goes so far as
when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the
consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little
way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final
task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.
Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of
the divine purposes. It is the identity of the desire of the race with
the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the
motion of tides and of planets.

Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of
the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those
empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw
ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to
live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black
portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within
the mind? Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the
amphitheatre of Rome?

Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and
public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated
through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is
enacted. Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a
vast amphitheatre? And towards the mortal arena the empires of the
world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful
throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,
the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's
chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their resolution,
serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,
imperator, morituri te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to die
salute thee!"

And when th