For rightly understood those centuries gave us not only our culture,
our civilisation, and our Faith, but ensured them to us that they
should always endure. They established for ever the great lines upon
which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer
annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the
idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our
polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither
revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in
the secure possession of our own souls so that we alone in the world
might develop from within, to change but never to die, and to be--yes,
alone in the world--Christians.
The almost incredible strength and well being of those years must be
seized also. There was not a town in Italy and the West that did not
expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period.
It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals made, the great roads
planned and constructed, and our communications established for ever.
There was no industry that did not grow marvellously in strength,
there is not a class that did not increase in wealth and well-being
beyond our dreams of progress.
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