than that among the great soldiers of those times one would at last
arise whose practical intellect would discover the personal advantages
that must accrue from putting himself in relation with the universally
prevailing idea. How could he better find adherents from the centre to
the remotest corner of the empire? And, even if his own personal
intellectual state should disable him from accepting in its fulness the
special form in which the idea had become embodied, could there be any
doubt, if he received it, and was true to it as a politician, though he
might decline it as a man, of the immense power it would yield him in
return--a power sufficient, if the metropolis should resist, or be
otherwise unsuited to his designs, to enable him to found a rival to her
in a more congenial place, and leave her to herself, "the skeleton of so
much glory and of so much guilt."

[Sidenote: The coming Monotheism must be bounded by the limits of Roman
influence.]

Thus, after the event, we can plainly see that the final blow to
Polytheism was the suppression of the ancient independent nationalities
around the Mediterranean Sea; and that, in like manner, Monotheism was
the result of the establishment of an imperial government in Rome. But
the great statesmen of those times, who were at the general point of
view, must have foreseen that, in whatever form the expected change
came, its limits of definition would inevitably be those of the empire
itself, and that wherever the language of Rome was understood the
religion of Rome would prevail. In the course of ages, an expansion
beyond those limits might ensue wherever the state of things was
congenial. On the south, beyond the mere verge of Africa, nothing was to
be hoped for--it is the country in which man lives in degradation and is
happy. On the east there were great unsubdued and untouched monarchies,
having their own types of civilization, and experiencing no want in a
religious respect. But on the north there were nations who, though they
were plunged in hideous barbarism, filthy in an equal degree in body and
mind, polygamists, idolaters, drunkards out of their enemies' skulls,
were yet capable of an illustrious career. For these there was a
glorious participation in store.

[Sidenote: The new ideas coalesce with the old.]

Except the death of a nation, there is no event in human history more
profoundly solemn than the passing away of an ancient religion, though
religious ideas