158 THE WORLD MACHINE 



There are in the history of the last twenty centuries two 

 events of incomparable interest. The one was the extinction 

 of Hellenic civilisation ; the other was the Renaissance. Per- 

 haps at a later day, when history has ceased to be a babbler's 

 chronicle, the causes which resulted in these two momentous 

 events will be divined, and we shall understand the periods 

 of ebb and flood of the human mind as accurately as we now 

 follow the waters of the ocean. As yet they are profoundly 

 obscure. We may remark the introduction of gunpowder ; 

 but gunpowder was apparently known in some form to the 

 Greeks, and throughout the whole of the dark time. We may 

 consider the printing-press ; but the printing-press merely 

 substituted the turning of a wheel for the hands of forty slaves. 

 We may note the incoming of the compass ; yet it is not im- 

 probable that the compass, too, was obscurely known to the 

 Greeks, and that through travellers and conquerors who may 

 have come in contact with the peoples of the East it might 

 have been imported at any time within, say, fifteen centuries 

 before its use became general. 



We may prattle of the fall of Constantinople, the incursion 

 of Greek scholars into Italy, and the ensuing revival of a taste 

 for ancient letters ; but there is no evidence that the study 

 of Greek was ever wholly banished. And when we have idly 

 enumerated these inconsequent and insufficient " causes " we 

 are no forwarder. 



We cannot comprehend why it was that after a splendid 

 fruitage the vineyards should wither and their bearings cease. 

 We know as little why it was that after so many weary and 

 hopeless years the seed should spring again from the ground 

 and a new and vigorous life come again to men. Perhaps the 

 atmosphere of freedom and enlightenment in the earlier time 

 brought a kind of intoxication which ended in debauchery and 

 excess. Something of the sort appears obscurely to have been 

 the case. When the removal of every restraint to their power 

 bred madmen for emperors, Rome became less a capital than 

 a lupanar. 



Certainly there seems to have ensued a period of weakness 

 and exhaustion, and perhaps we may regard Christianity as a 

 sort of a fever which, in its period of weakness and exhaustion, 

 seized upon the race. 



This fever had to run its course. We know that in the end 



