The Past Is Gone

There Are No "Good Old Days" for Us to Go Back to...

The Past Is Gone: There Are No Good Old Days to Go Back to!

There’s no going back. The past is gone. There are no “good old days” for us to go back to.

“Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” — Ecclesiastes 7:10 (ESV)

By conscientiously trying to re-create the Roman Empire, you do not get Rome 2.0, you get the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Voltaire quipped, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. (Okay, maybe it technically was an empire, but it certainly was nowhere near as great or powerful as the actual Roman Empire was in its day.)

Rome arose organically. She was a living, vibrant cultural force at the time when her great men applied their skill and wisdom to increase her greatness. Nobody sat down and planned it all out beforehand. By the time Rome became a world power, nobody remembered exactly how it had started, so they had to make up a tall tale about a couple of twins who were raised by wolves. While it was actually happening, nobody bothered to record any of the history that was being made right before their eyes, because it didn’t really seem all that special at the time.