tion once admitted, upon what professed to promises of material civilisation, and from be conclusive evidence, the universal resur- the charms of a degrading sensuality, turned rection of all men followed as a logical con- men's minds in the direction of a spiritual sequence, and admitted, in the breasts of the futurity. As the miseries of mankind, and believers, of no dispute or hesitation. No the degradation of class upon class increased, limitation could henceforth be put upon the the vehement cry for a higher and more endoctrine; no shade of doubt could fall upon during blessing than any this life could offer it. Here was a standing point of certainty rose more generally, and more constantly. in metaphysical things amidst the shifting Philosophers and hierophants answered it to sands of mere human speculation, which the best of their power, and vied with one could not fail to arrest the attention, attract another in suggesting the possibility of that the sympathy, and sustain the belief of all blessed immortality which all the world who were not repelled from it by unconquer sighed for; but their efforts, in spite of every able prejudices,--for into a critical examina- prepossession in their favour, were almost tion of the facts alleged there was little utterly frustrated, simply because they had disposition among the ancients to enter. It It no objective evidence to offer of the fact; was by prejudices, not by logical or histori- they could do no more than affirm upon cal criticism, that the faith of the gospel conjecture what the Christian preachers prowas resisted; and of these prejudices none posed to demonstrate by proof. It was not was so strong, none, we believe, so common, till every other means had been exhausted as the repugnance of the Greek and Roman to satisfy the universal craving, that men mind to the notion of a crucified Master, of accepted the consolations of Christianity; a Founder who had lived the life of a pau- it was not till the pride of man was thorper, and died the death of a slave and oughly abased by defeat and disappointcriminal. And this prejudice was undoubt- ment that he consented to throw his last edly heightened by the eager acceptance of prejudices to the winds, and embrace, as he the faith by the paupers and the slaves of believed, the certainty of the Christian docthe Roman world, by the outcasts, of what- trine, together with the dishonour of the ever class, from the luxuries and enjoyments Cross of Christ. of a voluptuous civilisation, by the blind and miserable, and poor and naked. Mr. Lecky observes, as so many have observed before him, on the almost total silence of Greek and Roman literature on the subject of the primitive Christians; but he will find that literature equally silent as to the inner life of all the Pariah classes of society; it is only of the upper ten thousand of the ancient world that any familiar knowledge has been vouchsafed to us by the philosophers and poets and historians of antiquity generally. Christianity has only shared, in this respect, the common lot of the masses throughout the Roman community.

And of this assured conviction of future life it is to be remarked that it was emphatically the aspiration and the despair of the age. The Paganism of Greece and Rome, utterly unable to satisfy itself on this head from its own resources, was looking intently towards the East for the light which seemed from time to time to dawn in that quarter. Faint and uncertain indeed were the rays of hope which reached it from Chaldea and India; yet the very general acceptance of the Mithraic cults and superstitions in the West during the second and third centuries seems to have been mainly owing to the sanction they seemed timidly to give to the yearning of the human mind for the greatest of spiritual consolations. The disenchantment of the world from the

2. This decision was itself an act of vigour, and it was carried vigorously into effect. We are accustomed to regard the age of the declining Empire as one of wide-spread languor and decrepitude. In its virtues we see but a pale reflection of the masculine virtues of antiquity; we deride even its vices as poor and spiritless in comparison with those of the lusty young world before it. And that such was the general character of Pagan society in its decline, both in its best phases and its worst, we are far from questioning. Nevertheless a want of earnestness and vigour and healthy activity is by no means to be wholly denied to the spirit of the age under which the Empire was converted to Christianity. There is, as we think, one great defect in the view Mr. Lecky takes of the secondary causes of this conversion. He thinks that society as a whole was ripe for the revolution; that it had been trained, by the schools of the philosophers and by the circumstances of the times together, into harmony with the creed of the gospel; in fact, he would not, we suppose, hesitate to affirm that the gospel was no more than the spontaneous expression of the general want and aspiration of humanity at the period. But he does not take into account the conditions under which the acceptance of the gospel by the age was alone possible. He fails to appreciate the fact that if Christianity was the expression of the want of the age, it

we to account for its establishment at all? Was Constantine so devout a believer that in his lifelong struggle to obtain and maintain his power, he deliberately took the side of the minority against the majority of his people? And if so, by what force did he achieve the triumph of himself and his adopted Church in the face of rebellious Paganism? The historians do not generally credit the first Christian Emperor with a strong and lively and unhesitating faith, and few of them, we suppose, will appeal to the cross he professed to have seen luminous in the

tion to account for the victory of the Milvian bridge. But the fact was, that if he had but one-fifth in number of the Roman world with him, he possessed full two-thirds of its moral strength; and this he was shrewd enough to discern at the turning moment of his fortunes. He discerned the real strength of Christianity, and he believed in Christianity because it was strong. If Constantine has acquired the title of "the Great" more easily perhaps than many of the conquerors or rulers to whom it has been popularly awarded, and if he has actually obtained it from grateful churchmen and courtiers, rather than from the voice of impartial history, it may seem nevertheless to be not unworthily bestowed upon the man who had the genius to divine the real spirit of political arithmetic, and discover that truth does not always lie with a multitude, nor strength with a numerical majority.

was so only in the same sense as the creed | anity. But what then? How, if so, are of Stoicism and the cult of Mithraism were so likewise. But Stoicism and Mithraism utterly failed to convert the Empire. Why so? Because Christianity embraced in itself a principle of conversion to which they were entirely strangers; because Christianity could enlist on its side all the heart and soul and vigour that still remained in the world; because Christianity approved itself the religion of moral strength in an age of general decrepitude. The acceptance of the gospel merely as a spiritual theory required the sacrifice of a natural prejudice. as we have seen; and the sacrifice even of a pre-heavens, and resort to miraculous interposijudice implied some force of character in those who made it; but the acceptance of the gospel as a practical rule of life implied the undertaking of many active duties, subjection to many restraints, a profound selfdevotion, a rigid self-denial, in the mortification of many worldly interests; and these constituted in themselves a moral training of the highest and the most active faculties. A history of the Morals of the primitive age of Christianity is very incomplete without a full discussion of a subject to which we can only thus cursorily advert. The fact is, that the gospel, with all its scandals and its dangers, offered a very strong attraction to the most vigorous minds of the declining Empire. It spoke as with the voice of a trumpet, to the brave, the generous, the active, and the vigorous. It called out from the decrepit society of the philosophers, and the popular moralists and religionists, just those spirits with whom self-sacrifice was a natural religion, and who only yearned to find a Divine sanction for it. It was those, and few but those, who could renounce the allurements of Pagan luxury, who could accept the obligations of the Christian family, who could endure hardships and poverty and persecution for an idea; who could renounce employments and means of living which they reputed sinful, and content themselves with the work of their hands in many meaner and more irksome occupations; it was those only who embraced the Christian faith during the long period of its struggles for general acceptance. Great pains have been taken by the historians to estimate the rate of progress of the new faith in the Roman world; and it is generally admitted that in the time of Constantine, at the moment of its recognition and establishment, and again even a century later, at the period of its highest exaltation, it numbered but a small minority of the population of the Empire. Opponents of the faith, such as Gibbon, have insisted the most warmly on this point, with a view, as it would seem, to disparage Christi

It is, then, in the attraction it presented to all the moral strength of men, and in the power of stimulating and animating that strength which it developed, that the real moral revolution effected by Christianity is to be traced. Now, this is what we think Mr. Lecky has almost entirely missed. He sets out in his Preface with the statement that "the questions with which a historian of Morals is chiefly concerned are the changes which have taken place in the moral standard, and in the moral type. By the first," he says, "I understand the degrees in which, in different ages, recognised virtues have been enjoined and practised. By the second, I understand the relative importance that in different ages has been attached to different virtues." And this distinction he illustrates from a consideration of the different way in which the recognised virtue of humanity could be understood by the Roman who practised the combats of the gladiators, and the Englishmen of the Tudor period who patronised the baiting of animals. Undoubtedly the general impression which the perusal of his History

Once more, let us examine the assertion | ligion, it is because not the religion merely, that Polytheism was eminently tolerant, in but the whole political constitution, of the as far as a contrast is implied in it between national enemy was devoted to proscription the moral practice of the of the Pagans and and annihilation. If the Armada had been the Christians. We must regard Polytheism successful, it would not have been a mere as its action was exemplified in the civic persecution of heresy that would have followpolity of the ancient nations; and we must ed; the persecution would have merged in the remark at once that the toleration of the extinction of the English polity, and, as far as Roman government has been much magni- practicable, in the destruction of the English fied only because it has been much misunder- people. This was what the Romans understood. The Roman government tolerated took and effected in Carthage. Certainly all forms of religion towards which it enter- not a vestige of the Punic religion has surtained no jealousy. The Romans in their vived in history from that catastrophe. earlier period had a peculiar uneasy sense of their own intellectual and spiritual deficiency as a nation. They were eager to embrace the ideas of every people with whom they came in contact. They felt themselves inferior in these respects to the tribes which shared with them the soil of Italy, the Etruscans and the Greeks. They were conscious that, as conquerors of these old and decrepit communities, they had entered into possession of a culture higher and nobler than their own, and they bowed down with awe before the spiritual revelations of more august and more æsthetic religions. They incorporated with their own almost the whole of the Etruscan, almost the whole of they Hellenic ritual, until the religious system of Rome became the medley of jarring incongruities so unconsciously displayed to us in the Fasti of Ovid.

But when they extended their conquests beyond Italy, and learnt to contemplate religious ideas and practices of a different, and, as they conceived, of an inferior type, the Romans were by no means disposed to regard them with the same favour. Perhaps, indeed, the imitative or receptive age of national childhood had then already passed with them. In Greece, beyond the sea, no doubt, they might find the same religion which they had already assimilated with their own at Neapolis and Tarentum; but with the ideas and practices of Carthage they felt no sympathy, nor allowed them for a moment to bear any part in the modification of their own. Neither in religion nor in polity, nor again in art, literature, or manners did the Romans accept or tolerate the ideas of their Punic foe. Delenda est Carthago was their motto, and they carried it out morally as well as physically. They rooted out the whole civilisation of Carthage as thoroughly as they overthrew her walls and levelled her palaces. A few lines of gibberish in a single play of Plautus represent all the intellectual genius which once illustrated the rival, the equal, for a moment the superior of Rome. If we do not read of any proscription or persecution of the Punic re

Of the Asiatic nations whom they conquered at a later period the Romans had generally no such jealousy. They did not care to exterminate the polities of Asia Minor and Syria, and accordingly they suffered their rituals to exist and flourish. But even this toleration was broken from time to time by outbursts of sanguinary repression. The mysteries of Bacchus were denounced as fatal to Roman manners, and hateful to the Roman gods. It concerned the honour of the gods, and the safety of the State depending on their favour, to interdict and banish them. The rites of Jews and Egyptians were proscribed for the same reason. The Jews were more than once expelled from Rome, and their worship severely prohibited, because in the Roman view the religion of the Jews was hateful to the gods, and therefore pregnant with danger to the polity of Rome. For the same reason, again, the Druidical caste was subjected to persecution, and actually exterminated by the arm of power. The religious ideas of the Gauls were in some degree assimilated with those of their conquerors, but the political expounders of their creed were utterly destroyed with fire and sword.

When Tiberius hazarded his politic sentiment that injuries to the gods may be left to the care of the gods themselves, the Roman conscience was outraged just as the conscience of mediæval Christendom would have been outraged.

The Romans of that declining age felt as sensibly as our simple forefathers, in the flush of triumphant Christianity, the religious duty of protecting from foreign insult the object of their personal veneration. They had the same feelings as the Christian; feelings which were ready at any time to break out in acts of sanguinary persecution. It was only the immediate object of their feeling that was different. The Roman believed that his patrons must be protected to insure the safety of the State. The medieval Christian held that the favour of God secured not only protection to the State, but spiritual help and benediction to the individual worshipper also.