Page:The empire and the century.djvu/41

 England, that had been consolidating themselves outside the bounds of the Empire. From one point of view the history of Europe ever since the downfall of the Empire may be regarded as one great revolutionary movement, one prolonged carnival of destruction. To the sublime system of the Middle Ages there had succeeded a chaos of warring nationalities and warring religions, amid which all hope of unity speedily disappeared. The very ideals of the Middle Ages perished or ceased to be intelligible. With the Reformation the Universal Church was shattered into fragments, and it soon began to be forgotten that the Universal Empire had ever claimed to be universal. When the religious wars were ended, and an appearance of stability had been restored, statesmen were content to aim at a mere balance of power, and during the wars of the French Revolution the small vestiges of the mediæval Empire that still remained were finally swept away.

Yet through all the ineradicable desire for unity survived in the minds of men, and from time to time asserted itself, if only by way of futile protest against the excesses of the destructive movement When the Reformation seemed to be leading through license to anarchy the Spanish Empire of Philip II. came upon the scene, the product in the secular sphere of the same movement of thought that produced the Tridentine Church in the religious, and threatened the civilized world with subjection. And when in a similar manner the French Revolution had shaken the whole edifice of political order to its foundations, the Empire of Napoleon sprang into being—short-lived, indeed, yet a splendid if premature and ill-directed effort towards the attainment of that political unity which is the essence of the Imperial ideal, and of which mankind has never wholly lost sight since the days of Julius Cæsar.

But though in the aspect we have been considering, that is to say as against the mediæval order and the much grander ideals of which it was such a hopelessly inadequate reflection, the six centuries that followed the