conversion must be told hereafter in his life. But the scene which
his master-hand has drawn is not merely the drama of his own soul or
of these two young officers, but of a whole empire. It is, as I
said at first, the tragedy and suicide of the old empire; and the
birth-agony of which he speaks was not that of an individual soul
here or there, but of a whole new world, for good and evil. The old
Roman soul was dead within, the body of it dead without.
Patriotism, duty, purpose of life, save pleasure, money, and
intrigue, had perished. The young Roman officer had nothing left
for which to fight; the young Roman gentleman nothing left for which
to be a citizen and an owner of lands. Even the old Roman longing
(which was also a sacred duty) of leaving an heir to perpetuate his
name, and serve the state as his fathers had before him--even that
was gone. Nothing was left, with the many, but selfishness, which
could rise at best into the desire of saving every man his own soul,
and so transform worldliness into other-worldliness. The old empire
could do nothing more for man; and knew that it could do nothing;
and lay down in the hermit's cell to die.

Treves was then "the second metropolis of the empire," boasting,
perhaps, even then, as it boasts still, that it was standing
thirteen hundred years before Rome was built. Amid the low hills,
pierced by rocky dells, and on a strath of richest soil, it had
grown, from the mud-hut town of the Treviri, into a noble city of
palaces, theatres, baths, triumphal-arches, on either side the broad
and clear Moselle. The bridge which Augustus had thrown across the
river, four hundred years before the times of hermits and of saints,
stood like a cliff through all barbarian invasions, through all the
battles and sieges of the Middle Age, till it was blown up by the
French in the wars of Louis XIV., and nought remains save the huge