m, this is the prayer of a
Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her
dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the
dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the
world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the
revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of
those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause
is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her
history is its great comment.

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not
less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither
Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,
stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than
the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the
Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and
then only shall the Holy War end.

The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity
of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending. And
Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all
his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of
an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims
fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen
music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things
human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian
age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but
the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the
proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's
respite to a war-fatigued world.

Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the
Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval
Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_. This "Truce of God" was a
decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain
sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against
another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval
equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of
Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support
than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,
giving to