For my own
part, I cannot see that history does repeat itself, except in trifling
details, and in the lives of unimportant individuals.
"I think," he rejoined, "if you have studied the decline of the Roman
Empire, you must have seen a striking analogy between that and our own
history at the present time. With the exception of changes of manners,
which only affect the surface of society, we are in much the same state
now as the Romans were then."
"I know many people say so, and believe it," Ideala answered; "and
there is evidence enough to prove it to people who are trying to arrive
at a foregone conclusion; but it is not the resemblances we should look
to, but the differences. It is in them that our hope lies, and they
seem to me to be essential. Take the one grand difference that has been
made by the teaching for hundreds of years of the perfect morality of
the Christian religion! Do you think it possible for men, while they
cling to it, to 'reel back into the beast and be no more'?"
"But are men clinging to it?"
"Yes, in a way, for it has insensibly become a part of all of us, and
has made it possible for us to show whole communities of moral
philosophers now in a generation; the ancients had only an occasional
one in a century.
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