ome master competent to the greatest
themes might take the trial of Paul as the subject of a picture.]

* * * * *

In a Roman audience-chamber, the old civilization and the new
civilization brought out, at the very birth of the new, their chosen
champions.

In that little scene, as in one of Rembrandt's thumb-nail studies for a
great picture, the lights and shades are as distinct as they will ever
be in the largest scene of history. The champions were perfect
representatives of the parties. And any man, with the soul of a man,
looking on, could have prophesied the issue of the great battle from the
issue of that contest.

The old civilization of the Roman Empire, just at that time, had reached
a point which, in all those outward forms which strike the eye, would
regard our times as mean indeed. It had palaces of marble, where even
modern kings would build of brick with a marble front to catch the eye;
it counted its armies by thousands, where we count ours by hundreds; it
surmounted long colonnades with its exquisite statues, for which modern
labor digs deep in ruined cities, because it cannot equal them from its
own genius; it had roads, which are almost eternal, and which, for their
purposes, show a luxury of wealth and labor that our boasted locomotion
cannot rival. These are its works of a larger scale. And if you enter
the palaces, you find pictures of matchless worth, rich dresses which
modern looms cannot rival, and sumptuous furniture at which modern times
can only wonder. The outside of the ancient civilization is unequalled
by the outside of ours, and for centuries will be unequalled by it. We
have not surpassed it there. And we see how it attained this
distinction, such as it was. It came by the constant concentration of
power. Power in few hands is the secret of its display and glory. And
thus that form of civilization attained its very climax in the moment of
the greatest unity of the Roman Empire. When the Empire nestled into
rest, after the convulsions in which it was born; when a generation had
passed away of those who had been Roman citizens; when a generation
arose, which, excepting one man, the emperor, was a nation of Roman
subjects,--then the Empire was at its height of power, its
centralization was complete, the system of its civilization was at the
zenith of its success.

At that moment it was that there dawned at Rome the first gray
morning-light of the new ci