that supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but
as single habitations." But as the old man spoke with animation of
this supreme city, this invisible society, whose conscience was
become explicit in its inner circle of inspired souls, of whose [11]
common spirit, the trusted leaders of human conscience had been but
the mouthpiece, of whose successive personal preferences in the
conduct of life, the "old morality" was the sum,--Marius felt that
his own thoughts were passing beyond the actual intention of the
speaker; not in the direction of any clearer theoretic or abstract
definition of that ideal commonwealth, but rather as if in search of
its visible locality and abiding-place, the walls and towers of
which, so to speak, he might really trace and tell, according to his
own old, natural habit of mind. It would be the fabric, the outward
fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond the great city
around him, even if conceived in all the machinery of its visible and
invisible influences at their grandest--as Augustus or Trajan might
have conceived of them--however well the visible Rome might pass for
a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius even
asked himself with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret
society the speaker had in view:--that august community, to be an
outlaw from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss
so much greater than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from
the sovereign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the
great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their
example over their successors--these were the ideas, stimulating
enough in their way, [12] by association with which the Stoic
professor had attempted to elevate, to unite under a single
principle, men's moral efforts, himself lifted up with so genuine an
enthusiasm. But where might Marius search for all this, as more than
an intellectual abstraction? Where were those elect souls in whom