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eclectic audience of higher minds, would fain believe it, but dies at sixty-three before he has made up his mind. Virgil, as a poet, sets forth the old tradition, in which a certain sort of future life with an accompanying retribution appears; but he significantly dismisses his guests through that ivory gate which he says transmits falsehood. And indeed in what was such a life to consist? Was Achilles for ever to drive his chariot, and Homer to recite his verses, in the pale moonlight beneath the earth? What object in the future world did polytheism offer to satisfy the aspiring soul of man? Its gods were deified men, who carried out the enjoyment of every human lust with superhuman power. Could the human heart love and adore that Jupiter whose private life was the consecration of all wickedness? whose government did not distinguish between good and evil? Rather Nero as emperor was a fitting representative of Jupiter as god. And as to the material deity of the philosophic mind—that is, under the name of spirit, a fluid finer than ether, and devoid of willwas it more possible for Plato or Cicero to love and adore such a god than for men now to love and adore the law of gravitation?

In fact, despair and depression had seized on the higher class of minds, while the lower wallowed in gross sensuality. And the whole may be summed up in one word, "there was wanting the consciousness of sanctity in God, and the need of

sanctification in .man."* In other words, their state was the contradiction of the precept, "Be ye holy, for I am holy."

Maker, and in losing In proportion as the darkened to him, the

Man, then, had lost his his Maker had lost himself. knowledge of God had been knowledge of his own soul had been darkened also. If he admitted that he had a soul, it was such a soul as he gave likewise to the animals: a soul whose union with the body was broken at death, never to be restored; a soul which, if it survived that shock, survived not with a separate conscious existence, capable of its own joy or sorrow, reward or punishment, but as reunited to that worldsoul, of which it had been a portion temporarily detached and enclosed in a fleshly prison. This was the root of that profound contempt for human life which ruled the heathen society. Hence the slave perished undeplored, unvalued, on the rack, in the underground workhouse, of disease, of overlabour, the sport of his master's or his mistress's passion or caprice. Hence the rich man, after indulging every fancy, and revelling to satiety in every pleasure, would "die of weariness."+ Hence suicide was deliberately proposed by the most moral of heathen philosophic systems as an escape from pain, disease, bereavement, or disappoint

ment.

Hence the noblest, bravest, and wisest of

• Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 633.
+"Fastidiose mori."

the Romans surrendered first the political liberties of their country under Julius and Augustus, and then every security of individual life under Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero. And thus man, "noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in form and moving express and admirable, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals," was become in his own eyes without value: his labour, the profit of a master; his death-agony, the pastime of a mob; all his destiny on earth, the sport of chance, the victim of despotism, the instrument of blind fatality; and at last his body the prey of destruction, his soul absorbed as a drop lost in the ocean of being.

It has been my purpose hitherto to set before you two pictures of the Roman empire; one of its greatness, the other of its littleness; one of its material unity, extent, and magnificence; the other of its moral poverty and desolation; both touched in as few strokes as possible from the writings of its own historians, poets, moralists, and philosophers. But there exist two descriptions of the same great power, drawn by two contemporaries who were eye-witnesses of what they described, yet at the same time outside of it, antagonists not portions of its society. And it is further remarkable, that their descriptions, though both taken from the moral point of view, dwell the one specially on the exhibition of material power, the

other specially on the exhibition of moral dissolution. Nor will the intrinsic force of these descriptions be lessened to any thinking mind by the fact they express not merely the opinions of eyewitnesses, but the judgment of inspired writers. One of these witnesses, summoned to Rome on a capital charge in the reign of Domitian, thus afterwards described what he had seen: "The waters which thou sawest, where the harlot sits, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues;-and the woman which thou sawest is that great city which holds dominion over the kings of the earth :— Babylon the great,-who says in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and may not see grief; --for her merchants were the princes of the earth, for by her sorceries all the nations have been led astray; and the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and wantoned with her, shall weep for her and mourn over her, saying, Alas, alas, Babylon, that great city, that strong city;--and the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one any longer buys their freight; freight of gold and silver, and precious stone, and pearl, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all sweet wood, and every ivory vessel, and vessel of most precious wood, brass, iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointment, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and cattle, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of

men."* Do we not see here the long line of a triumph defile before us, and Caractacus walking in chains, and the forum full of the slaves of all nations, and the world's shipping which crowds the Tiber from Ostia to Mount Aventine, and Nero's golden house, and his banquets in the gardens of Agrippa, and countless thousands calling for their human prey from the piled-up seats of the Coliseum?

The other description was addressed to the Christians at Rome by one who afterwards lived two years at least there, and having been acquitted once by the Emperor Nero returned thither to suffer a glorious martyrdom. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of men, who keep down the truth concerning God by their injustice. Because what is known of God is manifest in them; for God has manifested it to them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world understood by what He has made are plainly seen, likewise His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. Because when they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor give thanks, but grew vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened: for, calling themselves wise, they became fools; and they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds Apocalypse, xvii. 15, 18; xviii. 2, 7, 23, 9-13.

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