time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City,
as it were some celestial new Rome, in the midst of it.

These are but a few glimpses at this very significant and far-reaching
book, which indeed takes for its theme the very development from pagan
to Christian idealism with which we are dealing. In it, in countless
bright and vivid glances, the beauty of the world is seen with virgin
eye. Many phases of that beauty belong to the paganism which surrounds
us as we read, yet these are purified from all elements that would make
them pagan in the lower sense, and under our eyes they free themselves
for spiritual flights which find their resting-place at last and become
at once intelligible and permanent in the faith of Jesus Christ.




LECTURE III

THE TWO FAUSTS


It may seem strange to pass immediately from the time of Marcus Aurelius
to Marlowe and Goethe, and yet the tale upon which these two poets
wrought is one whose roots are very deep in history, and which revives
in a peculiarly vital and interesting fashion the age-long story of
man's great conflict. Indeed the saga on which it is founded belongs
properly to no one period, but is the tragic drama of humanity. It
tells, through all the ages, the tale of the struggle between earth and
the spiritual world above it; and the pagan forms which are introduced
take us back into the classical mythology, and indeed into still more