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growing sentient life, and in his apocalypse gives us not so much 
the past, which the scientific man can talk about; not the present 
which the philosophical man sees; but the future, which unrolls 
itself before his eyes. 
In considering the problem to be solved in the discussion of 
The Principles of Western Civilization, we must first gain some 
clear view of the drama of human action as it unrolls itself before 
our eyes on the page of history, and in order to do this we must 
be willing to seize the salient points and work from these, discover- 
ing as far as we can the principles which were at work when this 
particular salient point was flung out from the mountain range of 
human action, and trying as far as we can to relate the various 
peaks we see standing out before our eyes. 
Can there be any real doubt that in the civilization of the 
western world there have been two great agencies at work, which 
can be indicated by the terms “the Roman Empire,” and 
“ Christendom?” Of course we may trace back the enormous 
range of life which died up into the Roman Empire. We may 
trace back from Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, till we 
come to Rome, and we may find in Rome the elements drawn out 
of the long struggle of race against race; but we come to this fact 
at last, which Gibbon makes clear to us: that at one period of 
the human race all the fairest tracts of the best part of the western 
world, and all the power which was being worked out in the lives 
of men, was concentrated in that organisation known as the 
Roman Empire ; and by a wonderful process the powers which 
had specialised themselves became united in the person of one 
single man, and at a particular date,—say 27 B.c., after the Battle 
of Actium,—we have the marvellous spectacle of the whole of the 
countries surrounding the Mediterranean being governed by 
principles which found as their exponent one single man, the 
Erperor of Rome. That surely represents to us one of the great 
agencies which has been at work in the civilization of mankind,. 
Now if we move on through the centuries, and pass from the 
striking figure of Augustus to a typical medizeval figure,—say 
Dante,—what do we find? Is there any essential difference 
between those principles working in the heart of a representative 
min like Dante, and those which we found culminating in the 
character of a man like Augustus? Take his Divina Commedia 
and his other works, and we find we are in a different world. 
That solitary, exiled man carries within himself another principle, 
which seems to present a more potent and far-reaching influence 
than anything we can find in the time of Augustus, By about the 
year 1300 A.D. a new principle had found its way into those 
civilising principles which had hitherto been at work, and it could 
never thenceforth be rejected. Strong men cannot live without 
it ; it has come to form a part of the very fibre and tissue of their 
souls. 
