system of monarchy, of leisurely and privileged gentlefolk_s, of rather despised industrial and trading people and of downtrodden and negligible laborers, and poor and common people, seemed the most stably established way of living that the world has ever

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in this period there was no ruling unifying idea in men's minds. The impulse of the empire had failed until the Emperor was no more than one of a number of competing princes, and the dream of Christendom also was a fading dream. The developing "powers" jostled one another throughout the world; but for a time it seemed that they might jostle one another indefinitely without any great catastrophe to mankind. The great geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century had so enlarged human resources that, for all their divisions, for all the waste of their wars and policies, the people of Europe enjoyed a considerable and increasing prosperity. Central Europe recovered steadily from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War.

The ideal they sustained was the ideal of a polite and polished world in which, men of quality, that is, for no others counted would be ashamed to be cruel or gross or enthusiastic, in which the appointments of life would be spacious and elegant, and the fear of ridicule the potent auxiliary of the law in maintaining the decorum and harmonies of life. Voltaire had in him the possibility of a passionate hatred of injustice, and his interventions on behalf of persecuted or ill-used men are the high lights of his long and complicated life-story. And this being the mental disposition of Gibbon and Voltaire, and of the age in which they lived, it is natural that they should find the existence of religion in the world, and in particular the existence of Christianity, a perplexing and rather unaccountable phenomenon. The whole of that side of life seemed to them a kind of craziness in the human make-up. Gibbon's great history is essentially an attack upon Christianity as the operating cause of the decline and fall. He idealized the crude and gross plutocracy of Rome into a world of fine gentlemen upon the eighteenth-century model, and told how it fell before the Barbarian from without because of the decay through Christianity within. In our history here we have tried to set that story in a better light. To Voltaire official Christianity was "lnfame"; something that limited people's lives, interfered with their thoughts, and persecuted harmless dissentients. And indeed in that period of the interregnum there was very little life or light in either the orthodox Christianity of Rome or in the orthodox tame churches of Russia and of the Protestant princes. In an interregnum incommoded with an abundance of sleek parsons and sly priests it; was bard to realize what fires had once blazed in the heart of Christianity, and what fires, of political and religious passion might still blaze in the hearts of men.

"Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious zeal have diffused, among the savages of the Old and New World, those inestimable gifts, they have been successively propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce, in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the

Some topics in this essay:
House Bourbon, John Huss, Gibbon Western, Voltaire Gibbon, Gibbon Voltaire, Middle Ages, Empire Rome, Roman Empire, China Huns, Russia Protestant, eighteenth century, gulf finland, creative ideas, provisional age,