The Ineffable Mercy of God

Western Civilization is toppling because she has abandoned her roots: “public and private moral virtue and respect for the natural [moral] law” and a belief—at time implicit and at other times explicit—in the one and only God. Governments would do well to look to ancient Rome for guidance:

Meanwhile Rome had developed a remarkably well constructed system of checks and balances to prevent the domination of their government either by the patrician class … or by the kind of popular assembly whose inconstancy had doomed Athens. As we shall have more than ample opportunity to see in the course of this history, even the best political structure is of very little value without public and private moral virtue and respect for the natural law; but all this the people of the Roman republic had, in an impressively high degree (Warren H. Carroll, The Founding of Christendom, 216, Emphasis mine.).

God watches over his worldwide family and allowed the Romans a chance to develop their potential and set the stage as it were for the Incarnation of the Son of God in the fullness of time.

These early Roman moral qualities and the system of government of the early Roman republic, complementing each other, laid the foundation for their eventual dominion over the Western civilized world, though not until Rome had been tested and annealed in the crucible of the Punic Wars with sinister Carthage could this potential be realized (Ibid.216).

In his monumental work, The Everlasting Man, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, points to the magnificence of Divine Providence in the struggle that left its mark on the rest of history:

It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, things divine descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. … -- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 154-155, Emphasis mine.