ht subsume men's most strenuous efforts after
righteousness. And he proceeded to expound the idea of Humanity--of a
universal commonwealth of mind, which [10] becomes explicit, and as if
incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect.

Ho kosmos hosanei polis estin+--the world is as it were a commonwealth,
a city: and there are observances, customs, usages, actually current in
it, things our friends and companions will expect of us, as the
condition of our living there with them at all, as really their peers
or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation of a
visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to
which the intercourse of life proceeds--such a music as no one who had
once caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the
becoming, as in Greek--to prepon: or ta ethe+ mores, manners, as both
Greeks and Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for duty.
Righteousness would be, in the words of "Caesar" himself, of the
philosophic Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of the
oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities--of the royal, the
law-giving element, therein--forasmuch as we are citizens also in that
supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as
single habitations." But as the old man spoke with animation of this
supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become
explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose [11] common
spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but the
mouthpiece, of whose successive personal preferences in the conduct of
life, the "old morality" was the sum,--Marius felt that his own
thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not
in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract definition of
that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of its visible
locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of which, so to speak,
he might really trace and tell, according to his own old, natural habit
of mind. It would be the fabric, the outward fabric, of a system
reaching, certainly, far beyond the great city around him, even if
conceived in all the machinery of its visible and invisible influences
at their grandest--as Augustus or Trajan might have conceived of
them--however well t