foundations.

The vast despotism of the Caesars, gradually effacing all national
peculiarities, and assimilating the remotest provinces of the empire to
each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after
Christ, the prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. A system of
etiquette, as pompously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been
established. A sovereign almost invisible; a crowd of dignitaries
minutely distinguished by badges and titles; rhetoricians who said
nothing but what had been said ten thousand times; schools in which
nothing was taught but what had been known for ages: such was the
machinery provided for the government and instruction of the most
enlightened part of the human race. That great community was then in
danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of
the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies, to which nations are
liable,--a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality
of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilisation. It would be easy to indicate
many points of resemblance between the subjects of Diocletian and the
people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries, nothing
has been learned or unlearned; where government, where education, where
the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to
increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth, or
the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste no
augmentation.

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other
political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of
Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject
only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals;
and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the
orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points
of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the
operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the
stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of a
stormy democracy in the quiet and listless population of an overgrown
empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not
do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant
to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an
eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of
Greg