The Ruin of the Ancient Civilization and the Triumph of Christianity/Foreword

FOREWORD Signor Ferrero has given us one more arresting work on the subject which he has made his life study. Though his reputation is already world-wide amongst scholars and thinkers, I should like to be allowed to say one word to that large and ever-increasing number of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who are not classical scholars or students of history and who, living as many of them do isolated by circumstances, whether in the depths of the country or in crowded cities, have no kindred spirits with whom they can discuss the thoughts that surge up in their minds. In Signor Ferrero's pages they will find many of the data for which they have unconsciously been searching, cleverly sketched for them by a master hand, and stirring parallels drawn between the third century and their own. The world is realizing that the great treasures of its magnificent heritage are in danger of being swept from it in the whirlpool of unrest which has followed the awful calamity that recently threatened its very existence, and men and women of every class are asking themselves what they can do to avert disaster. Signor Ferrero does not pretend to answer that question, but, by restating the history of the past in modern terms to a generation which has forgotten or has never read Gibbon, he has given the priceless aid of clear knowledge to the citizens whose views constitute the public opinion of the present, and upon whose right thinking the whole future of civilization depends.

E. W.