Such the Romans were in the day when their dominion had not extended
beyond the limits of Italy; and because they were such they were able to
prosper under a constitution which to modern experience would promise only
the most hopeless confusion.

Morality thus engrained in the national character and grooved into habits
of action creates strength, as nothing else creates it. The difficulty of
conduct does not lie in knowing what it is right to do, but in doing it
when known. Intellectual culture does not touch the conscience. It
provides no motives to overcome the weakness of the will, and with wider
knowledge it brings also new temptations. The sense of duty is present in
each detail of life; the obligatory "must" which binds the will to the
course which right principle has marked out for it produces a fibre like
the fibre of the oak. The educated Greeks knew little of it. They had
courage and genius and enthusiasm, but they had no horror of immorality as
such. The Stoics saw what was wanting, and tried to supply it; but though
they could provide a theory of action, they could not make the theory into
a reality, and it is noticeable that Stoicism as a rule of life became
important only when adopted by the Romans. The Catholic Church effected
something in its better days when it had its courts which treated sins as
crimes. Calvinism, while it was believed, produced characters nobler and
grander than any which Republican Rome produced. But the Catholic Church
turned its penances into money payments. Calvinism made demands on faith
beyond what truth would bear; and when doubt had once entered, the spell
of Calvinism was broken. The veracity of the Romans, and perhaps the happy
accident that they had no inherited religious traditions, saved them for
centuries from similar trials. They had hold of real truth unalloyed with
baser metal; and truth had made them free and kept them so. When all else
has passed away, when theologies have yielded up their real meaning, and
creeds and symbols have become transparent, and man is again in contact