"Take heart! the Waster builds again,

A charmed life old Goodness hath; The tares may perish, but the grain Is not for death.

"God works in all things; all obey

His first propulsion from the night; Wake thou and watch! the world is gray With morning light."

III. ROME.

WHEN Jesus Christ was born, Rome was seven hundred and fifty-three years old. In that time it had grown from a little village on the Palatine into a great city with two millions of people, in fact into the great city of the world. More than that, by its genius for political organization, it had first made all Italy part of itself, and then made the whole Mediterranean basin subject to its rule; and before long its provinces stretched from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and from the Danube to the Numidian desert. It had become an Empire, and the Master of the World. It was not yet all it became as a city. Many of the great buildings whose ruins still draw the world to the sight had not yet arisen. But it had organized a system of law which has lasted longer than its most solid structures. It had created a literature only second to that of Greece, and which already was in the splendor of its noon. The wealth of conquest was coming to give it new magnifiThe Republic was past, and the emperors were to enrich it with forums, basilicas, temples, and amphitheatres, with triumphal arches and columns, with aqueducts and baths, and to replace brick with marble. It was a colluvies gentium. The old Latin and Sabine farmers and traders who lived on its hills would not have felt at home with such a mixed crowd of Egyptians and Moors, of Greeks and Asiatics, of Jews, Italians, Iberians, and Gauls, as made its mixed population eight centuries later. At the centre of the Forum, Augustus set a gilded milestone, from which went out thirty-one roads to the ends of the Empire. These highways opened the world to Rome for coming and going. The traveller could pass with ease from Cadiz to Byzantium, from Cologne to the cataracts

cence.

of the Nile. Over these roads the legions went out to protect the boundaries, and traffic came to bring all luxuries to the capital. Everything and everybody came to Rome,

Greek artists and rhetoricians, Alexandrian corn-merchants, African lion-hunters, Jewish pedlers, captives by thousands to crown a general's triumph, gladiators butchered "to make a Roman holiday," curious travellers to see the wonders and enjoy the pleasures of such a city; here a prisoner like Paul, here a messenger like Phoebe carrying his Epistle; from east and west, from north and south, all sorts of people came to bring something or find something in this metropolis of all the nations. The first families, the optimates, made themselves rich by foreign plunder; but most of the people were poor, and a million of them slaves, with from six hundred to a thousand senators, ten thousand knights, fifteen thousand soldiers; the rest were "people," the plebs urbana, a great proletariat, prolific of social danger, and supported at public expense.

1

Of Rome in the making, little is to be said here. There had been a monarchy and a republic, with whatever cloud of myth over its beginnings and early history. The legends may pass with whatever kernel of truth was in them. There were patricians and plebeians; there were Gaulish invasions and Samnite and Punic wars; there were the struggles of the people with the aristocracy, with victory and assassination to Cæsar, the leader of democracy, and the founder of the Empire at last. Enough that Rome began and grew, and at last, as the result of these seven centuries and more, there is a compact life here, a solid city, the city of cities, with wealth, with government, with religion, with the pride of a great history, with the power of a great Empire, with the glory of unconquerable arms. Enough that here is a mighty imperialism beginning the experiment of new centuries of dominion. Enough, above all, that here is a great Rome already made, waiting for a

1 Merivale says five hundred. History of Romans, i. 62.

new religion, worth receiving, worth propagating far as its roads or arms could go. Enough that here at the centre of civilization, the new history of the world, with its feeble beginnings at Jerusalem, is to take foothold, and start for another empire, of wider reach and deeper foundations than, that of the Cæsars.

The Cæsars were the chief pontiffs of the religion which had been inherited from Rome's earlier days. It was a plain, homely faith, of exact, regulated, almost military ceremonial, with the dry, prosaic character of the primitive Romans. It was without enthusiasm, and took its inspiration from political feeling, for it was the creature of the state, without doctrine, or even a code of morals. There was no emotion, no kindling vision, no satisfaction for the heart. It had not even the airy grace and charm of the Greek mythology. It was dry, legal, an obligation to be punctually met in order to secure the protection of the gods. It was commercial, so much ceremony and so much favor in return. It made the father of the family supreme, and gave much ceremonial sanction to marriage, and was a support to the magistracy. It may have produced heroes, never saints. It was selfish rather than inspiring; civic rather than spiritual, or even mythologic; the religion of patriotism rather than of faith, or even of ethics. The pontiffs were civil officers, not an unworldly clergy. Says Cicero: "Our ancestors were never wiser, never more inspired of the gods, than when they determined that the same persons should preside over the rites and ceremonies of religion and the government of the state." In the course of time it had received foreign elements, which, however, had not radically changed its character. "The gloomy faith of the Etruscans, the genial mythology of the Greeks, the fanatical mysticism of Asia, all left their mark on the liberal religion of the conquering Republic, always ready to tolerate and find

1 Uhlhorn, Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism, p. 34.

room for the various gods of the nations whom the sword of the legions had ejected from their homes. But so long as the capitol remained the centre of Roman religion, and Romans were Romans by blood and not by adoption, the foundations of the national religion continued firm, and withstood the assaults of foreign divinities." There were divinities enough for everything, for every part of nature and every event of life. There were indigitamenta, or registers, with lists of gods for all human wants, so that no one need be deceived. There were forty-three gods for childhood, from the infant's first cry through all his eating and drinking, and sports and studies. There were gods for war and agriculture, for marriage and maternity, for trade and the chase; gods of the sky and the seasons, of the sea and the gardens, of the household and the state, of beginnings and boundaries, even of thieves and drains. The words of the frivolous Petronius were more than a joke, that "this country is so peopled with divinities that it is easier to meet a god than a man.' If there was any supreme deity, it was Rome itself. The Jupiter of the Capitol represented the state; and when the Empire came the Emperors themselves became gods, receiving divine honors. This was the strength of their religion, and the chief virtue it produced. The Roman felt that he belonged, not to himself, but his country. Religion took the form of patriotism, and when that declined with the expansion of the Empire, and the opening of Rome to alien influences, barren ritualism or puerile superstition took its place. Attempts were made to arrest the decadence, but at the end of the Republican period Rome was full of indifference or scepticism.3 Foreign religions came, but the new gods gave no more satisfaction to restless hearts than the old ones, and only scepticism was left. Wealth, lux

1 W. R. Inge, Society in Rome under the Cæsars, p. 5.

2 Boissier, La Religion Romaine, i. 4.

Ibid., i. 54-63.