nourable banners, and could inscribe upon their shields a
rational and intelligible device. Indeed, unless the modern Liberal
admits the strength inherent in the cause of his enemies, it is
impossible for him to explain to himself the duration and obstinacy of
the conflict, the slow advance and occasional repulse of the host in
which he has enlisted, and the tardy progress that Liberalism has made
in that stupendous reconstruction which the Revolution has forced the
modern political thinker to meditate upon, and the modern statesman to
further and control.

De Maistre, from those general ideas as to the method of the government
of the world, of which we have already seen something, had formed what
he conceived to be a perfectly satisfactory way of accounting for the
eighteenth century and its terrific climax. The will of man is left
free; he acts contrary to the will of God; and then God exacts the
shedding of blood as the penalty. So much for the past. The only hope of
the future lay in an immediate return to the system which God himself
had established, and in the restoration of that spiritual power which
had presided over the reconstruction of Europe in darker and more
chaotic times than even these. Though, perhaps, he nowhere expresses
himself on this point in a distinct formula, De Maistre was firmly
impressed with the idea of historic unity and continuity. He looked upon
the history of the West in its integrity, and was entirely free from
anything like that disastrous kind of misconception which makes the
English Protestant treat the long period between St. Paul and Martin
Luther as a howling waste, or which makes some Americans omit from all
account the still longer period of human effort from the crucifixion of
Christ to the Declaration of Independence. The rise of the vast
structure of Western civilisation during and after the dissolution of
the Empire, presented itself to his mind as a single and uniform
process, though marked in portions by temporary, casual, parenthetical
interruptions, due to depraved will and disordered pride. All the
dangers to which this civilisation had been exposed in its infancy and
growth were before his eyes. First, there were the heresies with which
the subtle and debased ingenuity of the Greeks had stained and distorted
the great but simple mysteries of the faith. Then came the hordes of
invaders from the North, sweeping with irresistible force over regions
that the weakness or co