HALF A CENTURY: OR, CHANGES IN MEN AND MANNERS. CHAPTER I. IN A TIME OF PROGRESS. N the life of a nation or in the annals of the world, half a century may go for next to nothing, or it may be pregnant with promise and achievement. In the infancy of civilisation, with its miracles of stupendous architecture, progress was so slow as to be wellnigh imperceptible. The Tower of Babel was the beginning of public works, which have left their memorials in the colossal monuments of the Egyptian dynasties. Apparently proportioned to the intolerable length of patriarchal lives, they show that time was as little valued as human effort. The ephemeral A empires of the East, the tiny Greek republics, or the military world - power of all-absorbing Rome, merely refined on the arts, or perfected the organisation of their predecessors, as they moved onwards in the familiar grooves. The troubled sleep of the middle ages, broken by a monotony of hideous nightmares, was but the repose of an inevitable reaction when the shock of the barbarians had paralysed the old forms of activity. The systems of society had been subverted; the brutality of force was again in the ascendant; knowledge was proscribed, for men of learning were martyred if they had not the fortune to find powerful protectors; and from the palace to the hovel, from the king to the serf, there was a long and unceasing struggle for existence. In Europe, through that dark and dreary night, the Church was the sole safeguard of the oppressed, as she was the last refuge for the thinker with some tincture of letters. But the Church had renounced or neglected her mission before the structures her corruptions had sapped were shaken by the zeal of a Hildebrand. Then came the Renaissance and the Reformation, with the promise of release of life and thought, animating the manifold gifts and aspirations which ever since have been multiplying and directing themselves into fresh channels. Since the dawn of the Renaissance the world has been |