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Truly it is a perfect paradise, but it is almost as inaccessible as the Paradise which we all seek. What long-lost civilizations have ruled these now deserted solitudes? Penetrate into the dark, dank forest, as I have done, and ask the question. The only answer is the howling of the monkeys and the screaming of the cockatoos.
Then, as emigrants from the old countries go out into the new ones, they want to be supplied with the comforts and appliances of the older civilizations, such as, to take an obvious example, railways.
The United States might be expected to make no great way in civilization till they be fully peopled to the Pacific; and it might not be unreasonable to expect that, when that even has occurred, the greatest civilizations of that vast territory will be found in the peninsula of California and the narrow stripe of country beyond the Rocky Mountains. This, however, is a digression.
Whether they presented themselves as enemies or colonists they brought with them something of Asia, the great mother of civilizations. This Russian art, therefore, was never struck with decadence as was the Byzantine art. It did not live solely upon itself, but profited by all that was brought from the Orient.
True, the Marduk and Nabu cults were upheld by the Persian rulers, and the policy of the latter in not disturbing the religious status was continued by the Greeks when they in turn succeeded the Persians in their control of Babylonia, but the presence of strange civilizations with totally different religious trains of thought was bound to affect the character of the old faith, and in time to threaten its existence.
This sort of ideal tableau, the geometrical as well as psychological, is not very complex, and we soon detect the limitations of organic conditions to which civilizations, the same as crystals, are forcibly confined. What do we find in man at the point of departure?
But Christ believed it, and Christ said it, and when He said it, the new world, the world in which we live, began to be. The great difference between ancient and modern civilizations, one eminent historian has said, is to be found here, that while ancient civilization cared only for the welfare of the favoured few, modern civilization seeks the welfare of all.
We do not wish to defend or attack the ideas, but to summarize them and understand them in a way that will give a group picture of the purposes, ideas, policies and day-to-day activities of the civilizations in question.
If the Englishman gets his Hs pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find him a good companion. But, after all, here is a great fact between us. We belong to two different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to talk through.
She sat with her chin resting upon the palm of her hand, in absorbed, almost pained, contemplation, as if the actual scene were merely the starting-point of a long journey of the imagination. In fact, there was nothing intrinsically interesting in the couple before them. They possessed not even the picturesqueness of speech and costume which belongs to the plebeian orders of older civilizations.
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