of logic and rhetoric for their own sake. The nature of a spirit, the dimensions of an angel when compared with a needlepoint, the origin of things, were themes much better for logical practice than were any of the inquiries which might be raised in the department of utility. For Christ to be born in such an age was something of a misfortune, for the great thinkers took up the intricacies of his case, and omitted what was most pertinent to human life. In less than a hundred years after the death of Jesus, Alexandria and Rome and all the shore of the Mediterranean swarmed with men who could write or discourse for hours or days upon the enigmas which were made possible by the Christian religion. The Asiatic pagans believed in starvation, daily washings, sacred water, and in passing the hand along the back of a sacred cow.

While classic literature was dying under the influence of despotism and immorality, the new religion was building up a form of reflection and sentiment which cared little for the temporalities of mankind. If Virgil wrote the Georgics to make agricul

ture more popular among the declining youth of the age, he composed his appeal a hundred years too late, and we cannot find any similar task undertaken by the advocates of the new religion. Along with Virgil himself his fields disappeared. The end of the world was so near that all Christian rhetoric was busy over the strange country whither all were going. Heaven had reduced the value of farm-lands. By the time the classic men had all died to make room for Christian philosophers Origen had come with his interminable commentaries; and by the time the new era was well versed in his volumes, Plotinus was on hand with a genius that dazzled the third century, and with ideas that formed a labyrinth compared with which that of the Minotaur was only a two-roomed log-cabin. Christianity had become a factory of conundrums.

It is universally admitted that Plotinus taught that in order to have perfect knowledge the subject and the object must be omitted; that the thing apprehending must not be apart from the thing apprehended; that the spirit of man must have everything

within itself; that intuition is the path to knowledge; that by the spirit the unconditioned might be discerned; that out of the spirit comes the soul; and that by the means of the soul the spirit comes into contact with a material world. For a long time it was not known whether these writings were the friend or the enemy of the new Christianity; but after the church had been out in the woods long enough to lose all knowledge of what it was itself, it found no difficulty in feeling that it and Plotinus were both one. It is easy to be either of two things when neither of the things can be understood.

The first mental faculty to fall into ruin was the reasoning power. The classic lands had created a race of logicians who can now be compared to the great moderns, such as Burke, Mill and Webster. Between Aristotle and Tacitus lay a great period of logical excellence. The famous Greek orator in his greatest oration spoke about four hours without using a single line of poetry or a single phrase from the storehouse of fancy. In the speeches of

Demosthenes, no flower bloomed, no bird fluttered with bright wings, no nightingale sang. One would as soon expect a lily to bloom in Euclid's Geometry as to rise up in an oration of that old master. Each sentence was a part of an argument of which a geometrician would be proud. Cicero and Tacitus were at the western end of this mental force. Both the Plinies and Sallust and Horace were models of the same style. When Rome fell not only did agriculture fail and Virgil's fields grow up in blackberry bushes, but reason fell and men who would have been logicians in Pagan times became wonder-lovers, bigeyed and easily deluded. The only punctuation mark needed for a thousand years was the exclamation point. The dark ages were caused by a new style of punctuation. The interrogation point of Socrates was superseded by the exclamation point of magicians.

It was not the Goths that overthrew Rome. The Goths simply plundered the World's Fair grounds after the exhibition had been closed. Out of the debris of

both the Court of Honor and the Midway Plaisance they made an intellectual and theological junk-shop. By means of internal corruption, Rome had committed suicide. The great men from Cæsar onward hastened to kill each other. All the eminent men having been slain, public vice prevented their sons from ever being great enough to be worthy of assassination.

To the ravages of all the vices the new religion added its literature of abstraction and credulity. The destruction of Jerusalem had broken up all the relations of Judaism and its offspring to an earthly nation. The Jews were scattered and broken-hearted; the Christians looked only to a millennium and heaven. So far as the new religion touched Roman thought, it made it religious and dreamy and transformed possible Ciceros and Plinies into such persons as Origen and Augustine. There was no longer any conception of any grand nation except the one that was going to have gates of pearl and streets "inlaid with patines of bright gold." All the new politics was that of the upper air. A scien