116 THE VERDICT OF HISTORY. 
Constantine the Great, Luther, Napoleon I, and Bis- 
marck? All these great makers of history were what 
they were far less in consequence and by the continuation 
of the course of previous events or developments, than 
largely in spite of the past and in direct opposition to 
forces which had worked together in shaping the condi- 
tion of things with which they had to deal. The Mace- 
donian empire would never have sprung into being but 
for an Alexander, in whose mind the chief facts for its 
realization were united. The Rome which Julius Ceasar 
left behind him was not that which he had found, only 
carried forward to a new stage of development, but the 
embodiment of ideas conceived in his mind, a quantity 
which under God the greatest Roman had made out of a 
quantity which he had found. The distinctive features 
of the Constantinian empire as compared with that of 
Diocletian, or of the tetrarchy of which he was the head, 
were not evolved from earlier political principles, but 
stood out in bold contrast and even in direct opposition 
to the very fundamentals of antique statesmanship, and 
so new in politics that even Constantine permitted them to 
slip away from his grasp long before the sunset of his 
life had come. Luther was not a more fully developed 
Hus or Savonarola, and the Reformation was not the 
more advanced stage or completion of a movement in- 
augurated by the Humanists, but a work of God the 
actuating spirit of which was as diametrically contrary 
to the rationalistic spirit which animated Erasmus and, 
in a measure, Zwingli and his abettors, as it was to anti- 
christian Rome,—which was in 1517 essentially what it 
had been in 1302, when Boniface VIII issued his bull 
Unam sanctam as a definition of the rights and powers 
of Popery. Napoleon did not carry onward but broke 
away from the tumult of French politics when he laid 
the greater part of western Europe at his feet, and the 
