ted and purified
Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This
is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as
the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves
inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in
social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house
of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find
a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand
to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world's seers--from
Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante--the ideal of the City of
God. It is but little developed in the book which we are now
considering, for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and
inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this
"dear City of Zeus" shining in the clear light of the early Christian
time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City,
as it were some celestial new Rome, in the midst of it.

These are but a few glimpses at this very significant and far-reaching
book, which indeed takes for its theme the very development from pagan
to Christian idealism with which we are dealing. In it, in countless
bright and vivid glances, the beauty of the world is seen with virgin
eye. Many phases of that beauty belong to the paganism which surrounds
us as we read, yet these are purified from all elements that would make
them pagan in the lower sense, and under our eyes they free themselves
for spiritual flights which find their resting-place at last and become
at once intelligible and permanent in the faith of Jesus Christ.

LECTURE III

THE TWO FAUSTS

It may seem strange to pass immediately from the time of Marcus Aurelius
to Marlowe and Goethe, and yet the tale upon which these two poets
wrought is one whose roots are very deep in history, and which revives
in a peculiarly vital and interesting fashion the age-long story of
man's great conflict. Indeed the saga on which it is founded belongs
properly to no one period, but is the tragic drama of humanity. It
tells, through all the ages, the tale of the struggle between earth and
the spiritual world above it; and the pagan forms which are introduced
take us back into the classical mythology, and indeed into still more
ancient times.

The hero of the story must be clearly distinguished from Fust the
printer, a wealthy gold