s of Tacitus was laying the
foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly
imagined. For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no
altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater
than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her
bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the
village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall
find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,
and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil
his being's supreme law.

The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the
summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the
paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.
Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. And thus Britain
shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,
the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.

Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of
religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is
compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,
in social institutions. Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.

Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the
Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this
ever more clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the
Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius. In the
fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less
divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though contemporary of the
generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an
Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of
light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source
and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe
itself, and all the desires of men. In an age which silenced the
scholastics he founded Hell in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a
traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the
great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on
his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab
poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.

What does this import, unless that already the mutua