Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct,
had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their hearts, disbelieved it.
Temples were still built with increasing splendor; the established forms
were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence,
that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of
genuine belief that life had any serious meaning, there was none remaining
beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole
spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political,
cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch
the conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal
speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly
out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that
man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by
natural forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved.

Tendencies now in operation may a few generations hence land modern
society in similar conclusions, unless other convictions revive meanwhile
and get the mastery of them; of which possibility no more need be said
than this, that unless there be such a revival in some shape or other, the
forces, whatever they be, which control the forms in which human things
adjust themselves, will make an end again, as they made an end before, of
what are called free institutions. Popular forms of government are
possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral
principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice
than material expediency. Rome at any rate had grown ripe for judgment.
The shape which the judgment assumed was due perhaps, in a measure, to a
condition which has no longer a parallel among us. The men and women by
whom the hard work of the world was done were chiefly slaves, and those
who constitute the driving force of revolutions in modern Europe lay then
outside society, unable and perhaps uncaring to affect its fate. No change