They were kicked about like dead donkeys by the cool vivacity of Voltaire; who went off, very symbolically, to dance attendance on the new drill-sergeant of the Prussians.
They were dissected like strange beasts by the serene disgust of Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with which he regarded the similar violence of the French Revolution.
By our own time even the flippancy has become a platitude.
They have long been the butt of every penny-a-liner who can talk of a helmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can draw a fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professional politician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages.
Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renounced by their children and refuted by their biographers; they were exposed, they were exploded, they were ridiculed and they were right.
They were proved wrong, and they were right.

They were judged finally and forgotten, and they were right.

Centuries after their fall the full experience and development of political discovery has shown beyond question that they were right.
For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very thing which was dismissed, as a dream of the ages of faith, we have been forced to turn into a fact in the ages of fact.
It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe must rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces.
Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it would be better if the Entente could do so, I think a serious question.
But in some form they are reverting for the Roman Empire.
Every opportunity has been given for any other empire that could be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission for Imperial Islam.

If ever a human being had a run for his money, it was the Sultan of the Moslems riding on his Arab steed.
His empire expanded over and beyond the great Greek empire of Byzantium; a last charge of the chivalry of Poland barely stopped it at the very gates of Vienna.

He was free to unfold everything that was in him, and he unfolded the death that was in him.