The State and the Church Author:William Prall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: born, as their enemies loved to style them. It is impossible here to relate the many struggles that took place between the few and the many, the oligarchies and ... more »the democracies, of the Grecian cities. They were as numerous as the private wars that arose in mediaeval days; but I do want to speak of the evil political spirit that arose and that became the furies of Greece, and the ultimate cause of its downfall, the spirit that the Greeks called ardais, or sedition, a disease of society which sprang out of the great inequality which existed between the rich and the poor, and which may be defined as " a standing up in the state of one party with a malicious intent toward another." During the Peloponnesian "War this dreadful thing caused so much anxiety in the mind of Thucydides that he called the attention of his countrymen to it in language so weighty and so earnest that it is worth our while to see what it is that this philosophic historian tried so seriously to portray and define. " Revolution," he says,1 "brought upon the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstances," and whichare especially accentuated in war. " When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weak...« less