As an offset to these forebodings, it is undoubtedly well to remember that the world has passed through evil times before and has outlived them. It may even be admitted that wherever men have reflected enough to occupy themselves with forecasts of the future, their presentiments have been apt to take colour from their surroundings, and have sometimes been needlessly sombre. History tells us that the days upon which Gibbon afterwards looked back as the happiest humanity had known were days in which Christians and Jews were expecting the crash of the world, and in which the wisest of Roman Emperors gave it as a counsel of perfection, that the man who felt God within him should be ready for death as for a trumpet's call.[1] At a later time, which we now look back to as the golden season of romance and chivalry, England was covered with religious foundations created avowedly, as the charter of one of them states, because all things were tending visibly to extinction.[2] In the first of these cases the depression of thoughtful men was greater than the actual state of the world warranted; in the second, than facts later on justified; and yet if Marcus Aurelius could have seen the state of the world in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, or if the pessimists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had lived on into the fifteenth, when Pecock was able to say that "ever more the world decreaseth in people,"[3] they might have found abundant warrant for their despondency. On the other hand, history reminds us
- ↑ "περιμένων τὸ ἀνακλητικὸν ἐκ τοῦ βίου εὔλυτος."—Marc. Aurel. Antonin. lib. iii. p. 38.
- ↑ "Quia omnia tenclunt visibiliter ad non esse."—Statutes of Oriel College.
- ↑ Pecock's Repressor of overmuch blaming of the Clergy, part iii. chap. v.
