His vision of the universe, original or accepted,
inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the
historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in
time and space.

Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,
Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or
applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the
present hour. Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations
of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.

The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of
Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a
divine vengeance. The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and
of wrong-doing. The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption
and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.
Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the
individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's
history been decreed and proclaimed. Hebrew thought was perplexed and
amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and
the unjust man, and the misery of the good. But the sublime and
inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the
punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and
States.

In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout
Greek and Roman thought. In St. Augustine it reappears in its original
shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of
an historical argument. A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful
sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted
by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,
attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the
Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it. He sees Rome fall;
and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome
becomes to Augustinus--the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of
her pride, her idolatry, and her sin. Rome falls as Babylon, as
Assyria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some
fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass
away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces
with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.

So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for