ivilization, was at any rate
utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polis lost
its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and
laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who
might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a
corrupt adventurer.

What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our
immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis
triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the
nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still
use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And
Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of
taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges than a Nation
has of making men of alien birth its compatriots. A Jew of Tarsus could
easily be granted the civic rights of Rome: he could never have been
made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one
great City of Gods and Men' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on
the Nation.

What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from,
say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A
soil once teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept bare and
made ready for new sowing: skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of
herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the
garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground, and
even within the original walls the weeding had been hasty and
incomplete. At the end of a few generations all was a wilderness of
weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful,
with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming here and there in
the tangle of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion?
Is philosophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds? Well, think
what a weed is. It is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation
which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and will live without
the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with
difficulty; the weeds are what conquer us.

It has been well observed by Zeller that the great weakness of all
ancient thought, not excepting Socratic thought, was that instead of
appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective sense
of fitness. There were exceptions