Thus we, it is said, if we were not better instructed, might naturally take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin.  But the philosophy of history puts the whole matter in a different light.  It teaches us that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by no means peculiar.  It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace.  Other nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them:  and yet they have not been ruined.  Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life.  They were artistic, not scientific.  A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually had any existence in heaven.  And if we look back at the greatest civilisations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigour and intensity were purely human interests:  and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.

It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of which is still felt in the world.  Its main stimulus we are told was frankly human.  It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology had been taken from it.  And there, it is said, we see the positive worth of life; we see already realised what we are now growing to realise once more.  Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects, is spoken of as an ‘episode of disease and delirium;’ it is a confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking; and the feelings of the modern school are expressed in the following sentence of a distinguished modern writer:[2] ‘Just as the traveller,’ he says, ’who has been worn to the bone by years of weary striving among men of another skin, suddenly gazes with doubting eyes upon the white face of a brother, so if we travel backwards in thought over the darker ages of the history of Europe we at length reach back with such bounding heart to men who had like hopes with ourselves, and shake hands across that vast with ... our own spiritual ancestors.’

Nor are the Greeks the only nation whose history is supposed to be thus so reassuring to us.  The early Jews are pointed to, in the same way, as having felt pre-eminently the dignity of this life, and having yet been absolutely without any belief in another.  But the example, which for us is perhaps the most forcible of all, is to be found in the history of Rome, during her years of widest activity.  We are told to look at such men as Cicero or as Caesar—­above all to such men as Caesar—­and to remember