can hardly fail to produce changes inwardly,—­a new temperature, new conditions in the world of mind.  So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of readjustment.  New wine has been poured into the old skin-bottles of the world; and ferments, explodes, rends them.  Then, in the twenties or so, things calm down, and it is seen that readjustments have been made.  By ‘readjustments,’ one does not mean the treaties of statesmen and the like; brain-mind affairs for the most part, that amount to nothing.  One means a new direction taken by the tide of incarnating souls.  As if the readjusting cataclysms had blocked their old channels of these, and opened new ones...

A new arpeggio chord, but rather a faint and broken one, sounds in the five-twenties, or begins then.  At Constantinople the thirteen pralayic and recuperative decades since the death of Theodosius and the split with the West have ended.  Now an emperor dies; and it becomes a question which of several likely candidates can lay out his money to best advantage and secure the succession.  There is an official of some sort at court there, one Justin, a Balkan peasant by birth; you will do well to bribe him heavily, for he, probably, can manage the affair for you,—­ One of the candidates does so:  hands him a large sum, on the assurance from Justin that he shall be the man.  But the old fellow has peasant shrewdness, shall we say; and the money is used most thriftily; but not as its donor intended.  Justin duly ascends the throne.

Nothing very promising in that, to insure manvantaric times coming in.  But the old man remembers a nephew of his back there in Bulgaria or Jugoslavia or where it may have been; and sends for him, and very wisely lets him do most of the running of things.  In 527, this nephew succeeds to the purple on his uncle’s death:  as Justinian; and, for Europe and the Byzantine empire, and for the times,—­that is to say, ‘considering,’ —­manvantaric doings do begin.  A man of hugely sanguine temperament, inquisitive and enterprising and impulsive, he had the fortune to be served by some great men:  Tibonian, who drew up the Pandects; Belisarius and Narses, who thrashed the barbarians; the architect who built Saint Sophia.  Against these assets to his reign of thirty-eight years you must set the factions of the circus, at Constantinople itself; and bloody battle over the merits of the Greens, the Blues, the Whites, etc.  But certainly Justinian contrived to strike into history as no other Byzantine emperor did; with his law code, and with his church.  So now enough of him.