Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: knowledge of the whole, than a survey of the divided members of a body once endued with life and beauty can yield a just conception of all the comeliness and vigour which it has received from nature." The idea of a universal history was, then, the reflection and result of the universal empire of Rome, which made the known world externally one, a single great political whole. Rome made the world Roman and became herself cosmopolitan. The enervated generations of her decadence were citizens of the world, universal philanthropists, in mere thought and feeling; and her fate should be an eternal warning how little grand ideas and fine sentiments may do for the life either of a nation or of those who entertain them. The fault lay, however, not in the ideas or sentiments themselves, which are the richest part of the heritage Rome bequeathed the world; which have not died, and never will; which the life of society is even now a struggle to realise. The indebtedness of history to Rome, as exemplifying that unity of a universal government without which there could have arisen no notion of a universal history, is incalculable. The world has known external unity only in and through Rome, for the universal empire of Pagan Rome was the condition and foundation of the universal empire of Catholic Eome, and of that strange, changeful, phantom-like, yet most needful and influential existence, the Holy Eoman Empire—the condition and foundation, in a word, of that Church and of that State which served to prepare a spiritual unity yet unrealised, tie thought of which now possesses many hearts, but would never have been conceived had external unity not previously existed, and had not a present type and a venerable tradition of such a unity saved human society in medieval times from dissolution into...