to be "easier to find a god than a man."

There was the god Caius Cæsar, and the god Augustus Cæsar, and the god Lucius Cæsar, and the goddess Julia, the profligate daughter of Augustus, to whom the rulers of Athens ascribed the title of Providence. The senate of the Areopagus, and that of the six hundred, erected her statue and enacted her divinity. An altar had there been consecrated many years before, to "the Unknown God." Rome exceeded Athens in the number of her gods, only by having, as the mistress of the world, all nations to collect from and all forms of paganism to countenance. "The deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed in peace their local and respective influence; nor could the Roman who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber, deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile. Every virtue and even vice acquired its divine representative, every art and profession its patron, whose attributes, in the most distant ages and countries, were uniformly derived from the character of their peculiar votaries. It was the custom of the Romans to tempt the protectors of besieged cities by the promise of more distinguished honors than they possessed in their native country. Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects, and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind." "In this mania for foreign gods, the nobles and the emperors themselves set the most corrupting examples. Germanicus and Agrippina devoted * Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vol. 1, pp. 32, 35, 36.

themselves especially to Egyptian gods. So also Vespasian. Nero served all gods with the exception of the Dea Syra. Marcus Aurelius caused the priests of all foreign gods and nations to be assembled, in rder to implore aid for the Roman empire against the incursions of the Marcomanni. Commodus caused himself to be initiated into the mysteries of the Egyptian Isis and the Persian Mithras. Severus worshipped especially the Egyptian Seraphis; Caracalla chiefly the Egyptian Isis; and Heliogabalus the Syrian deities, though he was desirous of becoming a priest of the Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian religions."*

66

The traditions of the principal divinities of the ancient heathen are a true guide to the vices of their worship. What the gods were said to have been in their lives, their worshippers actually were in their service. "It is a shame," said one who knew them well, even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret." The chief oracles of the heathens appointed human sacrifices, so that not only the barbarians, but even the Athenians, Lacedæmonians, and Romans, were accustomed to worship idols with the blood of their fellow-creatures. What must have been the state of public morals when gods were patrons of vice, and their rites encouraged both cruelty and obsceneness, it is easier to imagine than describe. "Eusebius is compelled to use language when describing the height of wickedness and impurity which the worship of the heathens attained, * Prof. Tholuck on Heathenism. Biblical Repository.

such as no virtuous man can read without shuddering." The gods were entreated, by costly offerings on splendid altars, to favor the indulgence of unnatural lusts, the perpetration of murders, the robbery of the orphan and the widow. Seneca exclaims, "How great is now the madness of men. They lisp the most abominable prayers in the ears of the gods. And if a man is found listening, they are silent What a man ought not to hear, they do not blush to rehearse to God."* Well might St. Paul describe them as "given up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts."t

2. Consider the spirit of cruelty that reigned among those people. It was not solely owing to the madness and depravity of a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Nero, or a Caracalla, that a cruel and sanguinary spirit in their day was so universal. Had not the whole mass, the peasant, the soldier, the citizen, and the senator, as well as the prince, been foully tainted, the monstrous enormities of those vicious tyrants could never have been perpetrated. Such was the cruelty of Romans to their slaves, that it was not unusual to put the aged and useless to perish on ar island in the Tiber; and some masters would ever drown them, as food for the inhabitants of their fishponds. Scenes of blood and slaughter were the

*

Epist. 10. † See Potter's Antiquities, vol. 2, p. 301 "The custom of exposing old, useless, or sick slaves or an island of the Tiber, there to starve, seems to have been pretty common in Rome; and whoever recovered after having been so exposed, had his liberty given him by an edict of the emperor Claudius." "The ergastula, or dungeons, where

public diversions of the people. Witness the shows of gladiators in the crowded amphitheatre; when, to celebrate a birthday or gratify a popular whim, crowds of captives were set to mutual slaughter, or else to contend with the fury of wild beasts. What must have been the moral sensibility of those nations, of which the most refined females delighted in such revolting cruelties, criticising the skill of the ferocious swordsman, and exclaiming with enthusiasm at the graceful stroke that opened the heart of the vanquished, and poured out his lifeblood upon the arena?* St. Paul describes the heathen community as "full of murder and malignity." Hume, speaking of "the most illustrious period of Roman history," says, that

slaves in chains were forced to work, were very common all over Italy." "A chained slave for a porter, was usual in Rome, as appears from Ovid and other authors." The evidence of slaves" was always extorted by the most exquisite torments." Hume on the Populousness of Ancient Nations.

* 66 Who," says Hume, "can read the accounts of the amphitheatrical entertainments without horror? or who is surprised that the emperors should treat people in the same way the people treated their inferiors? One's humanity is apt to renew the barbarous wish of Caligula, that the people had but one neck. A man could almost be pleased, by a single blow to put an end to such a race of monsters." Note to Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations.

How Cicero, "the mildest of all pagan philosophers and orators," regarded with an inhuman approbation the cruelties above named, may be seen from his sayings, as quoted in Jortin's Discourses concerning the truth of the Christian Religion. He states that the supplications of a poor wretch begging his life on the arena, only made the spectators, as a matter of course, the more violent against him, and the more set upon his death See the Oration for Milo.

"at that time the horrid practice of poisoning was so common, that during part of a season a prætor punished capitally for this crime above three thousand persons in a part of Italy, and found informations of this nature still multiplying upon him. So depraved in private life," adds the historian, "were that people whom in their history we so much admire.”* Murder was in common practice among all classes. "Such," says Gibbon, "was the unhappy condition even of Roman emperors, that whatever might be their conduct their fate was commonly the same; almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder." Suicide was not only extensively practised, but advocated as a right, and commended as virtuous. Seneca pleaded for it. Cicero was its advocate. Brutus and Cassius, with many others, both defended and practised it. Cato is praised by Plutarch for having been his own murderer. These, in their day, were among the lights of the heathen world. What then must have been the awful deeds of darkness among the more ignorant populace?

They were "without natural affection." Nothing could exhibit in a more appalling light their utter annihilation of moral principle and natural affection, than the fact that "the exposition, that is, the murder of new-born infants, was an allowed practice in almost all the states of Greece and Rome: even among the polite and civilized Athenians, the abandoning of one's child to hunger or to wild beasts was * Essay on Politics.