a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last, for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired.  No wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of flaming idealism and endeavor.  Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus,—­they had worked wonders; but not the crowning wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come:  Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.—­So now Constantine has made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now Roman no longer:  You owe your first allegiance now, not to the state or to the emperor at its head, but to an imperium within the state which claims immunity from laws and duties:  the kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of divided kingdoms.  Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in his scales,—­and finds the fate is death, and no help for it:  there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,—­blackest night over the western world for God knows how long:  night, with nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no refreshment, no peace.  For the party that Constantine has now made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,—­ everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old, to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,—­these people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires:  they condemn the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no saving grace, from them whatever;—­will learn from them nothing in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits.  So, Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of life:  all that soap stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha;—­a pretty prospect!  Zeus sighs in heaven, and his sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.

—­And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on his arm, and says:  “Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look down—­there!”