In this war of ideas France had allies every where, and even on thrones themselves.
VIII.
There are epochs in the history of the human race, when the decayed branches fall from the tree of humanity; and when institutions grown old and exhausted, sink and leave space for fresh institutions full of sap, which renew the youth and recast the ideas of a people.

Antiquity is replete with this transformation, of which we only catch a glimpse in the relics of history.

Each decadence of effete ideas carries with it an old world, and gives its name to a new order of civilisation.

The East.
China, Egypt, Greece, Rome, have seen these ruins and these renewals.
The West experienced them when the Druidical theocracy gave way to the gods and government of the Romans.

Byzantium, Rome, and the Empire effected them rapidly, and as it were instinctively by themselves when, wearied with, and blushing at, polytheism, they rose at the voice of Constantine against their gods, and swept away, like an angry tempest, those temples, those ideas and forms of worship, to which the people still clung, but which the superior portion of human thought had already abandoned.