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 Cæsar--above all to such men as Cæsar--and to
remember what a reality life was to them. Cæsar certainly had little
religion enough; and what he may have had, played no part in making his
life earnest. He took the world as he found it, as all healthy men have
taken it; and, as it is said, all healthy men will still continue to
take it. Nor was such a life as Cæsar's peculiar to himself. It
represents that purely human life that flourished generally in such
vigour amongst the Romans. And the consideration of it is said to be all
the more instructive, because it flourished in the face of just the same
conditions that we think so disheartening now. There was in those times,
as there is in ours, a wide disintegration of the old faiths; and to
many, then as now, this fact seemed at once sad and terrifying. As we