It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.
[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan’s _The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.
Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.