'Alas! the golden city, and alas!
The trebly kindred triumphs.'
He laments over fallen earthly greatness:
'Dost thou flow,
Old Tiber, through a marble wilderness?
Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress.'
So laments the world over fallen worldly greatness and glory. Our own
estimate of the matter is the very opposite. We know, indeed, that the
time was coming, and coming apace, in which not only the great city
and its empire, but all the greatness and glory of the old heathen
world was to be so utterly swept away, that for weeks together the
very spot where Rome had once stood remained untrodden by any human
foot, and abandoned to the birds of the air and the beasts of the
field. But in all this we see nothing over which any man need lament,
unless, indeed, he esteems mere material prosperity above all that is
truly noble and exalted in man. Rather are we disposed to cry out with
exultation--
'Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become the
habitation of devils, and hold of every foul spirit, and a
cage of every unclean and hateful bird.--The kings of the
earth shall bewail over her, and lament for her, when they
shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for
the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas! that great
city Babylon, that mighty city,... which was clothed in
fine linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold
and precious stones and pearls.--Rejoice over her, thou
heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath
avenged you on her!'
For, in truth, all this splendour and luxury was not merely
associated, but inseparably one with a moral system, by far the most
execrable, the most indescribable, the most inconceivable, under which
God's earth ever groaned. The morals of the accursed race were far too
foul to be described here. They became the wonder and loathing, the
byword of contempt even of the heathen barbarians by whom they were
surrounded.[5] Lust, not merely unbridled, but wearing out and jading
itself to invent new ways of pollution; and cruelty, shedding man's
blood like water--these were the very foundations of the gorgeous
fabric. Any cure for these evils, except in the total sweeping away of
the whole order of society, was, as we shall soon see, utterly
hopeless.
First of all, the prosperity which we have described was only the
privilege of a favoured class. The mass of the population derived from
it no benefit. The whole social system was founded on slavery. The
whole domestic service, nay, the manufacturing, and what is to modern
ideas far more marvellous, even the intellectual labour, was performed
by slaves. It is calculated that in Rome itself the slave population
was twice or three times as numerous as the free. These slaves were
drawn from races fully equal to their masters in natural gifts, they
were often their equals even in culture; and every one of these slaves
was by Roman law not a person, but a thing. The male slave was not a
man, the female slave not a woman. 'The slave is without rights,
without a family, without a God.'[6] The hideous moral pollution which
this state of law not merely rendered possible, but consecrated, is
defended from exposure in the language of a Christian country by its
unutterable, inconceivable foulness; and of the moral system of
heathen Rome, as a whole, the same must be said. It is like the beast
of the American prairies, which no hunter dare touch because it emits
a stench which none can endure. We are well aware that this of
necessity prevents our exhibiting this side of the question with
anything like justice. Let us thank God that, far as our age has
fallen beneath the standard of Christianity, it is still so much
pervaded by Christian instincts that no writer, not even the most
utterly abandoned in his personal character, would dare to publish to
the world what was practised without shame or concealment by men who
were esteemed free from reproach and models of virtue. 'It is a shame
even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.' Thus
much, however, we may say, that the men whom the heathen Romans
honoured, not merely for greatness, but especially for virtue, lived
without shame in all the horrors described by St. Paul in that
terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; and poets, as
deeply pervaded as man ever was with a sense of the beautiful, nay,
who undertook to be the moral reformers of their age, introduced into
the midst of their most delicious strains not mention merely, but
praises of things which the moral standard of our age forbids us to
mention--even for execration; for these are they of whom the Apostles
testifies that 'they not only do such things, but have pleasure in
them that do them.'
Neither must we look upon slavery, and the indescribable system of
pollution which it sprang from, as an evil accidentally attached to
heathen society. It was intimately and essentially mixed with its very
life. It is important to observe that, so far as we know, there has
never existed upon earth any purely heathen civilized society of which
slavery has not been the basis. There is no reason to suppose that if
the Roman Empire had continued in all its greatness to the present
day, and had continued heathen, slavery would at this hour have been a
less essential part of its social and moral system than it was in the
days of Nero. Before it could have been abandoned, the whole habits of
life of all the free population of the Empire, and especially of Rome,
must have been fundamentally changed; and the change must have been
such that we can hardly imagine any nation to have been reconciled to
it except by some superhuman power; for it would have implied the
sacrifice of all the habits of self-indulgence and luxury upon which
Roman society was built. It is impossible to suppose that such a
change could have been effected, especially because, as far as
experience teaches, there never has been any instance of a heathen
nation which has begun to fall into decay and has been raised in any
degree to a new life. Such a national resurrection is one of the
miracles which nothing except Christianity has ever worked.
As to the barbarity of which the slave at Rome was the victim, we
might speak with less reserve if our space allowed. But we can devote
only a few words to a subject which would fill volumes. We will, then,
confine ourselves to suggesting two subjects for the consideration of
our readers,--first, the wholesale slaughter, merely for amusement,
which was one of the most cherished and universally diffused
institutions of Roman society, and was the delight of women as well as
men; next the state of the law with regard to slaves, and the manner
in which it was administered. The life of a Roman was of course always
held subject to the despair of his slaves, and hence it was the law,
that if a master was killed by his slave, under whatever
circumstances, or for whatever cause, every one of his slaves, male
and female, old and young, however manifestly innocent of all
complicity in the murder, however without power to have prevented it,
was to die upon the cross.[7] Tacitus tells how, in the reign of Nero,
even the populace of Rome was horrified at the execution of this law
in the case of the 'family,' as it was called, of a man of consular
dignity murdered by one of his slaves, it was reported, in consequence
of rivalry in a matter of infamous passion, or because the master had
received the price of his slave's freedom and then refused to fulfil
his engagement by giving him his liberty. His slaves were four hundred
in number; among them were not only men and women, but little
children, and the matter was brought before the Senate by some who
wished to temper in this instance the severity of the law. But the
proposal was indignantly rejected by Cassius, a Roman of noble family,
and whom the philosophic historian Tacitus expressly praises for his
knowledge of the laws of Rome. He argued that although in this case
the innocent would perish with the guilty, this must happen even when
a legion was punished by decimation, and that if some injustice was
committed, it would be outweighed by the public benefit. But his chief
argument was the authority of ancestral law:
'Our ancestors were wiser than we. I have often abstained
from resisting proposals to dispense with their laws, when
I felt that the change would be for the worse, lest I
should seem to be carried away by love of my profession.
To-day I cannot abstain. They suspected the disposition of
their slaves, even when they had been born in the same
lands and houses, and bred up in affection for their lords.
But since we have begun to have in our families whole
nations who have different customs, different religious
rites, or none at all, this confused sediment of all
peoples can be mastered only by terror.'
His arguments prevailed, and the whole four hundred, men, women, and
children, were sent to execution. The indignation of the populace was
overawed by soldiers supplied by the Emperor.
We have only indicated, not described the hideous state of Roman
society; what is really important is to observe, that man being what
he is, this monstrous system of blood and pollution must not be
regarded as any accidental evil; it was the natural, we do not
hesitate to say, the certain consequence of a high state of wealth,
civilization, and refinement in a heathen society. So far as we are
aware, there is no record of any heathen nation which has ever
attained to such a condition, in which moral corruption has not
overflowed all bounds, and in the end destroyed the nation itself.
Wealth, leisure, luxury, are of necessity temptations to an easy,
indulgent life. To this the experience of Christian nations forbids us
to shut our eyes. But in them, however far they may have fallen below
the practical standard of Christianity, unless all faith in the
supernatural, in the unseen world, in God, and in Christ is wholly
extinct, there are always fixed recognised principles upon which to
fall back; and there is a part at least of every nation resolved to
act on these principles, at all cost and all sacrifice. These are they
to whom our blessed Lord said, 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' In a
heathen society, on the contrary, when corruption once breaks loose,
where is the salt? There may be men like Cato the censor, who believe
that the fall of states is usually to be traced, not so much to
political as to moral and social causes, and foresee in the decay of
morals the ruin of their country. But what are they to do? They may
remonstrate, they may argue; but the evil they have to encounter is
not in the intellect, but in the will; and the will is exactly that
which they have no means of affecting. At Rome, for instance, the
danger and evil was not that men denied or doubted that it was only by
the stern and self-denying virtues that a State could be preserved, it
was that each man for himself preferred indulgence and ease, and
despaired of doing anything effectual for the public good, for he
felt, very truly, that even if he were, in his own person, to revive
all the simplicity and hardness of life of Cincinnatus or Fabricius,
he would not be able to change the national habits, or restore to the
standard of times gone by. Each, therefore, preferred to praise the
rigid virtues of former ages, and to practise the laxity of his own.
No man wrote more strongly or more eloquently in praise of ancient
manners and in condemnation of modern corruption than Sallust, the
historian. Yet no Roman palace equalled in luxury the gardens of
Sallust, the man. Nor was any Roman less scrupulous either in getting
money or in spending it. What, then, was to be done? The power of
passion was real and overpowering; virtue could only oppose to it
common-places and fine words, without being able to appeal to any
fixed principles or practical sanctions. It was a lamentable state of
things, but, as the ancients themselves believed, one which, in the
heathen world, followed by a necessary law, whenever any brave, hardy,
self-denying, and virtuous race of men, by the natural operation of
these virtues, rose to empire, and attained wealth, and the means of
luxury. The later Romans held up their own ancestors of early days as
the brightest example of virtue. Among them the gods were honoured and
worshipped, and the rules which had come down from their fathers were
strictly observed. Men were frugal, laborious, content with little,
valuing right and honour far above wealth and pleasure, and ever ready
to suffer or die for their country; women were chaste, modest,
retiring, preferring their honour to their life. That the men and
women of their own day were in all respects the opposite, was
self-evident; but it is to be observed, that they were so far from
considering this to be any special fault or misery of Rome, that even
those who most bitterly complained of the change were wont to boast
that no other nation had so long resisted the universal law, by which
wealth generated luxury, and luxury the desire of increased gain; and
this again made money, not honour and virtue, the national standard of
right and wrong, until at last, things getting ever worse and worse,
society itself was dissolved, and the national life perished. This
they considered to be the natural, nay inevitable course of things.[8]
This was a melancholy view of human affairs, but it seems certain that
with regard to a heathen state (and they knew of no other) it was
true. For to take the case of Rome itself, what sanction was there
even in the purest times of the Republic for those rules of right and
wrong--those great moral principles, which to a very considerable
extent were actually preserved; although, no doubt, men in later times
dreamed of a golden age which had never really existed. The only
religion they knew was silent about moral virtues. It taught men to
honour and worship the gods of their fathers, and to ask and hope from
them such worldly blessings as long life, health, &c. But that a man
of moral purity, justice, and mercy was a more acceptable worshipper
than one who was impure, unjust, and cruel, they never imagined, and
indeed, as long as they in any degree believed the traditions which
they had received as to the character of the gods they worshipped, it
was simply impossible that they should imagine it. There was nothing
contrary to the national religion, however men's consciences might
tell them that there was something immoral, in the prayer which Horace
attributes to one of his contemporaries--'Grant that I may succeed in
wearing a mask, that I may be supposed to be just and good. Throw a
cloud and darkness over my cheats and frauds.'
Religion, then, gave no moral rule, or at least none to individuals.
M. de Champagny ('Les Césars,' iii. p. 4) remarks, with great truth,
that so far as it had a moral code at all, that code and its sanctions
touched, not the individual man, but the State. Its morality was that
of the family, and through the family that of the city. Its object was
the prosperity, the glory, the aggrandisement of the public welfare.
The Roman virtues--courage in war, moderation in peace, economy in
private life, fidelity in marriage, these were patriotic virtues,
taught and practised as such.' What, then, was the moral code of the
early Romans? It was, as this passage suggests, the fundamental and
original law of the Roman people. Arnold well points out[9] that this
and this alone was the real moral law of the heathen nations in
general. In this sense their only standard of right and wrong was
human law; but not exactly what we mean when we speak of human law,
because we live in a state of society in which new laws are
continually passed; and to imagine that the 'statutes at large' could
be the real rule and measure of right and wrong, would go beyond the
possible limits of human credulity. But among the ancient nations new
laws were comparatively very rare. The Romans themselves had a great
system of what Jeremy Bentham used to call 'judge-made law.' This grew
to its perfection at rather a late period of the Empire, and still
forms the foundation of most of the systems of law existing in
Europe. It is not of this, however, that we are speaking. Of what we
should call statutes, there were passed in the whole of their history
very few. Only 207 in all are recorded as having been enacted in the
whole period of the Republic, and of these no less than 133 were
passed just at the latest period of its decay.[10] Their greater
frequency at this period was considered one of the signs of national
degeneracy, for it was a proverb, _corruptissimâ republicâ plurimæ
leges_. In fact, at Rome in its best days there can hardly be said to
have existed any machinery for making new statutes. There was, as we
understand the word, no legislative assembly. The judicial system out
of which grew the code of law to which we have referred already
existed; and when it was necessary, one of those grave changes which
are known among our kindred on the other side of the Atlantic as
'amendments of the constitution,' could be made by a vote of the whole
Roman people. To get one of these passed was often, during the best
periods of the Republic, a matter requiring years of furious struggle.
It is not, then, of statutes such as are passed year by year in our
Parliament that we are speaking, when we say that the law of the land
was the chief code of morals existing in heathen States. Quite
distinct from anything of this kind, and more answering to our 'common
law,' there were certain great principles of the constitution which
had come down to the Romans of the historical period by an immemorial
tradition, and which all men believed to have in them something
sacred. To touch them was to touch the very life of the Roman people.
Such principles there were in all the ancient heathen States, and
their sacredness was in each State a fundamental principle as long as
it retained any fundamental principles at all. This was, in fact, a
necessary part of heathenism itself; for the very essence of
polytheism is the belief that each people has its own gods, and,
therefore, springing from them, its own traditions of right and wrong.
From its own gods each people hoped for blessings and prosperity in
its national and corporate capacity. To offend or alienate them was to
risk the existence of the civil community, and what was the will of
the gods of any particular nation was to be learned from the primitive
original tradition of that nation.
Thus, the great principles of the ancient Roman morality, such for
instance as the sanctity of marriage, parental authority, and the
like, were, in the earlier days of the Republic, so mingled in the
notions of a Roman with patriotism, that it was impossible to separate
them. Adultery in a Roman matron, incontinence in a vestal virgin, was
an act of high treason against the common weal of the Roman people. As
such, it was monstrous and terrible to the whole people. Every man,
every woman, every child, felt it as much a personal injury, as each
would have felt the violation of the temples of their country's gods,
or the taking away of the palladium or the ancilia. The instance we
have selected was that upon which the Romans themselves felt that the
whole stability of their country rested. The sanctity of marriage was
the principle of the life of the Roman State. In the worst times a
poet, himself licentious, recognised corruption on that point as the
main cause of the ruin of the country--
'Fecunda culpæ sæcula nuptias
Primùm inquinavere, et genus, et domos
Hoc fonte derivata clades
In patriam populumque fluxit.'
But it would have been easy to mention other moral offences which in
their judgment directly threatened the safety of the common country.
Such, for instance, was the breach of a treaty, any outrage offered to
the sacred person of an ambassador, or even the removal of ancient
landmarks.
Thus it was that, in the earlier state of Roman society, the most
important moral principles--not to add that, from their nature,
conscience confirmed and enforced the national law and feeling--really
had an authority as strong as any human sanction can give. To violate
them involved loss of caste, and a great deal more. The offenders were
regarded as traitors against their country; the very mention of their
names would be the most deadly insult to those who had the misfortune
to be allied to them by blood or marriage. They became a proverb of
reproach. So terrible was this punishment that the law which gave to a
husband power of life or death over a guilty wife, and the feeling of
the nation which not only justified him in executing it, but required
it of him, hardly added to its severity. The virtues which tends to
success in war were also enforced by the circumstances of Rome. A
State contained within the walls of a single city and surrounded by
cities, many of which were as powerful as itself, and with each of
which it was liable to be at war, depended for its very existence upon
the courage, bodily strength, and military training of all its
citizens; and if the city was overcome in war, each of them was likely
enough to be sold as a slave, or at the very best to be reduced to a
position something like that of a serf. No wonder that under such
circumstances consuls and dictators were content to hold the plough,
and esteemed the success and victory of their country far more
important to each of them than their possessions or their life.
But when Rome became the head of a widespread empire, the preservation
of her early traditions became simply impossible. The contemporaries
of Augustus well knew that from war (except, indeed, civil war) they
had nothing to fear. The men of a generation earlier were no doubt
vexed and provoked by the disastrous defeat of Crassus and the
destruction of his army; but their personal comfort, nay, their very
pride of superiority to all the world, was no way affected by it. How
was it possible that they should really feel like their forefathers,
'When Romans in Rome's quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old?'
And, as for the more strictly moral traditions of the early
Republicans, they were, from their nature, from the very first, of
very limited application. Men who had never learned those glorious
truths,
'Which sages would have died to learn,
Now taught by cottage dames,'
that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men on the face of the
whole earth,' and (as the corollary from this) that 'God is no
respecter of persons, but that in every nation, he that feareth Him
and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,' were by no means
offended at the supposition that there was a different rule of
morality for men of different nations. Why not, as they had different
gods? The virtues, then, on which they insisted, were duties, not of
man as man to his Creator, but of Romans to Rome. They prized, not the
virtue of chastity, but the honour of the Roman matron; not truth and
good faith, but the oath to which the gods of Rome were invoked as
witnesses. The chastity of a slave or a freedwoman or even a
foreigner, was of no value. Men, to whom the Roman was not bound by an
oath taken before the gods of his country, had no rights. It was an
essential part of this system that men could not, if they would,
transplant themselves at will from the allegiance of the gods and of
the moral traditions of their fathers to those of another nation. It
was on this principle that in the earliest times marriages between
citizens of different cities were forbidden, and for the same reason
even those between a patrician of Rome and a plebeian.
Now, when many nations were welded together into a single empire, the
whole of this tradition broke down. Arnold remarks it as one great
political benefit of Christianity, that by 'providing a fixed moral
standard independent of human law, it allows human law to be altered,
as circumstances may require, without destroying thereby the greatest
sanction of human conduct.' What, then, was the situation of a Roman,
when the mingling together of all nations had effectually destroyed
all idea of the sanctity of the original traditions of any--his own
included--and yet he had found no 'moral standard independent' of
them. It is not too much to say that he was left without moral
standard at all. Patriotism and the tradition of their fathers had
become a name to men who could hardly be said to have any
'fatherland,' and whose country was the civilized world, and they had
no higher principle to supply their place.
In this utter break-down of all fixed principles which, in a heathen
age, necessarily resulted from the substitution of one great empire
for a multitude of minute republics; and in the complete isolation in
which it left every individual, when he lost the idea of that duty to
his country and his country's traditions which had been the moral law
of his ancestors, M. de Champagny sees the explanation of the fact, so
hard to account for, that men whose fathers had been proud nobles of
free and lordly Rome should have submitted as they did to such a
tyranny as that of Tiberius. For his was not one of those which are
supported by the sword. In Italy he had only about 9,000 men under
arms, and even they were scattered in the neighbourhood of the city.
Yet the Senate allowed itself to be decimated, its chief members cut
off day by day. It seems as if each man thought only of himself, and
calculated that although, of course, none could be safe, he was safer
by remaining quiet, and taking his chance, than he would be by boldly
appealing to the Senate and people to put an end to the protracted
massacre, by depriving the tyrant of his power.
The circumstance which, perhaps, is most revolting to our feelings as
Englishmen in the tyranny of the bad Emperor is, that it was hardly
possible to draw a line between an execution and an assassination. A
great man, untried, nay, so far as he knew, unaccused, was suddenly
roused from his sleep by the arrival of half a dozen soldiers, who
came to put him to death on the spot, or, perhaps, as a great favour,
to bring him the commands of the Emperor that he should kill himself.
How does this differ from an assassination, except in the assured
impunity of the murderers? Yet, so common was it, that when the
Emperor Pertinax was suddenly awakened on the night in which Commodus
had been slain, by those who brought him the offer of the purple, he
took for granted that he was to die. The feelings with which we regard
such proceedings have been formed by the immemorial law of our country
(which not even Henry VIII., in his wildest excess of tyranny, ever
dared to violate, except in a few cases, in which he obtained an Act
of Parliament, to authorize its violation)--that no man can be
condemned without trial. The Roman law, during the best days of the
Republic, carried the notion of 'strong government' farther than even
our neighbours in France would like. Within the walls of Rome there
was an appeal to the people from the sentence of any magistrate;
everywhere else, a consul or other officer holding the 'imperium'
might order whom he pleased to be beheaded by his lictors, without
trial. This, no doubt, was because, outside the city, the office of a
Roman consul was purely military. But this 'martial law' prepared
men's minds for the abuse of the same discretion within the city
itself by the Cæsars, whose position, as everybody knows, was,
legally, only that they were servants of the Republic, privileged to
hold a number of offices at the same time, and for years together.
They, therefore, naturally inherited and abused the discretion of the
old magistrates.
When such power fell into the hands of a Caligula or a Commodus, who
would not take the trouble of governing, it was really little more
than an entire exemption of the Cæsars from all law and all
restraints. The government seems to have gone on throughout the Roman
Empire much as usual. But there was in Rome itself one miserable
youth, mad with absolute licence, who could with impunity order the
murder of any one whom it struck his fancy to destroy, for any cause,
or for no cause, or because he was in want of money, and might take
the property of any one he was pleased to murder.
It was but for a time comparatively short that this state of things
lasted. Still, under the best reigns, one can hardly doubt, that there
must have been an uneasy feeling in the mind of the Emperor, as well
as of his subjects, that his successor might renew the times of
Caligula or Nero. Under the Antonines, perhaps, when there was a long
succession of good governors for more than eighty years without
interruption, men may have learned to look back on such things as
belonging exclusively to a by-gone age. But they were too soon
undeceived, after the death of Marcus Aurelius had left the succession
open to his unworthy son. Yet the crimes even of the worst of the
Cæsars affected Rome, not the world, and, indeed, in Rome itself,
almost exclusively a single class--the senators and the rich. They
seem, therefore, hardly to have been considered as an interruption of
the general felicity of the Pax Romana; any more than an epidemic of
cholera in our own days, which for a moment strikes terror upon the
city which it attacks, but is forgotten almost as soon as it passes
away.
Nothing so effectually blinds even the naturally clearest sight as
moral perversion. Over the very soul of Gibbon, strange to say, this
Egyptian darkness brooded so thick, that after intelligently studying
this vast, pathetic, and most instructive history, the only practical
lesson he drew from it was, that the great corruptor of human society
is--_Peace_. He says, 'It was scarcely possible that the eyes of
contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent
causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform
government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the
vitals of the Empire,' and the effects of this poison he traces in the
'decline of courage and genius, and in general degeneracy.' Strange
that he could imagine that war and bloodshed are the only conceivable
prophylactics against self-indulgence, luxury, and unmanly sloth.
Within the last few months we have had a remarkable proof of the
contrary. For fifty years after Waterloo, Prussia enjoyed profound
peace. France, to mention no other wars, had a continual school of war
in Algeria. Yet, though the French are as brave as the Germans, they
have been unable to stand against them for an hour in the present war;
because the tone of the governing class and of the army had been
undermined by the moral corruption of the Second Empire. Even if war
was indispensable, no man knew better than Gibbon that the Roman
frontiers were always in a chronic state of war. The lessons really
taught by the history of the Roman Empire during the first century and
a half, are so plain that one would hardly have thought they could be
missed. Here was a great Empire upon which all the best gifts of God,
in the purely natural order, had been poured with a lavish hand. It
occupied all the fairest, most fruitful, and most illustrious regions
of the globe, to which the climate and situation can never fail to
attract intelligent travellers from all less favoured countries. The
presiding races of that Empire, which gave their character to all the
rest, were those whom God had made His instruments to convey to all
nations the best gifts of Nature--the Greek, in whom were stored and
preserved the richest powers of genius, art, eloquence and philosophy;
the Roman, who has been the example and teacher of all nations, in the
great principles of stability, law, and order. For the use and
enjoyment of this Empire were stored all the accumulated wealth of
literature, poetry, learning, philosophy and art, which all ages of
the world had produced and treasured up. To complete the whole, it was
exempted for generations together from the scourge of war. In one
word, it had everything that God could give to man, except the
supernatural gifts of Faith, Hope, and Charity. And the result showed,
that, without these, all gifts of the natural order, however precious,
were unavailing to preserve human society from utter decay and
dissolution. It was not broken in pieces by the blows of foreign
enemies, but died of its own inherent corruption. The most prominent
visible effect of this corruption, which struck the eyes even of
heathens, was that man's vices made void the primeval blessing, 'Be
fruitful and multiply.' Plutarch, a Greek of the age of Trajan,
lamented that all Greece in his day could not supply as many men as
one of its smaller cities sent out to war four hundred years earlier.
The decline of population in Rome itself was no less rapid and steady.
And men died out, not because they were wasted by war, by pestilence,
by famine, or by grinding tyranny, but because unrestrained
self-indulgence dried up the very sources of increase. If there had
been no barbarians to rush in and fill up the void, the Empire would
have fallen in pieces for want of life enough to hold it together. Its
history proved that the real causes of the ruin of States are not
political, but moral and social, and that in nations, as in
individuals, the words of the poet are most strictly fulfilled:--
'Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word.
From Thee departing they are lost, and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace;
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man--
His high endeavour, and his glad success,
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.
But oh! Thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'