rchs and the prophets who,
throughout their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to what
echoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited patiently for
the greater revelation to come. To the same city belonged the magi who
followed a star till it halted over the stable in Bethlehem; Simeon, who
divined the present salvation of Israel; John the Baptist, who bore
witness to the same and made straight its path; and Peter, to whom not
flesh and blood, but the spirit of the Father in heaven, revealed the
Lord's divinity. For salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time,
not, as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthly
restoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of God in the Virgin
Mary, his death upon a cross, his descent into hell, and his
resurrection at the third day according to the Scriptures. To the same
city belonged finally all those who, believing in the reality and
efficacy of Christ's mission, relied on his merits and followed his
commandment of unearthly love.

All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between
these two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural;
two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one
corporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other
eternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the Church. These,
whatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radically
opposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was to
fill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together
and exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled,
the harvest should come; the terrible day of reckoning when those who
had believed the things of religion to be imaginary would behold with
dismay the Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven, the
angels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations of the dead
rising from their graves, and judgment without appeal passed on every
man, to the edification of the universal company and his own unspeakable
joy or confusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss with
God their master and the wicked everlasting torments with the devil whom
they served.

The drama of history was thus to close upon a second tableau: long-robed
and beatified cohorts passing above, amid various psalmodies, into an
infinite luminous space, while below the damned, howling, writhing, and
hal