Rome had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for an instant sunk back to the tiger.

Yet it was done, cried the great voice, and there was no repentance; it was done, and ages hence man must still do penance and flush scarlet with shame to remember that once he turned his back on the risen light.
There was no appeal to the lurid, no picture of the tumbling palaces, the running figures, the coughing explosions, the shaking of the earth and the dying of the doomed.

It was rather with those hot hearts shouting in the English and German streets, or aloft in the winter air of Italy, the ugly passions that warred there, as the volors rocked at their stations, generating and fulfilling revenge, paying back plot with plot, and violence with violence.

For there, cried the voice, was man as he had been, fallen in an instant to the cruel old ages before he had learned what he was and why.
There was no repentance, said the voice again, but there was something better; and as the hard, stinging tones melted, the girl's dry eyes of shame filled in an instant with tears.

There was something better--the knowledge of what crimes man was yet capable of, and the will to use that knowledge.