He is the hero of a lost
cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to
bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except
as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from
beyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the different
conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of
interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its
relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's
universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest
example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time
to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving
in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the
ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the
union of divine grace with heroic will,--the interpretation and
glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago
after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal
order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.
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