THE WORI.B AT THE APVEXT. 199 



her eye and Uie rose bud on her cheek, whispers to death, '^These were 

 our tokens, strike here.'" The body politic of the Empire seemed how- 

 ever to exhibit just the reverse. It seemed, that though the extremities 

 might be diseased, the centre of life was sound. 



Rome rioted in splendor. Augustus found it brick, and left it mar- 

 ble. The year was a long holiday— but ruin was written on the hag- 

 gard brow of every province as plain as Death could write it. The 

 heart seemed sound, and no irregularity of the pulse could be detected, 

 but the purple was beneath the nails, and the eyes were glassy. Many 

 of the magistrates were authorized plunderers ; much that was called 

 justice was legalized murder. The tax-gatherers or publicans to whom 

 the revenues had been farmed, extorted to the last degree, ihey sheared 

 the sheep to the quick, and took blood with the fleece. 



Yet in this huge and overgrown empire, the hist of possession was 

 not satisfied. The daughters of " the horse-leach '' were the tutelaries 

 of Rome. The cry of a people crushed by what they had already, was, 

 Give .' Give ! New lands must be subdued. To do this, new forces 

 must be raised and the provinces drained of wealth and men. These 

 seeing that the choice was between oppression and death at the hands 

 of the Romans, or at the liands of the nations against whom they were 

 led by their conquerors, rebelled again and again. Insurrections were 

 daily things, and the rumor of war had not died in one direction, be- 

 fore it was renewed in another. The Romans had almost learned to 

 regard defeat as impossible, except by gross mismanagement. A Ro- 

 man army never dreamed of meeting those whom they could not beat, 

 if they did their best. A defeat in modern times is not necessarily dis- 

 graceful to the general, nor distracting to the monarch. But when Var- 

 us was beaten in a battle with the Germans, in which he lost three le- 

 gions, in his anguish he slew himself, and Augustus, when the news 

 came, let his hair and beard grow, and, as though in utter despair, often 

 cried out, " O Varus, give me back my legions. " 



It is during unquiet times that great revolutions arise. There was an 

 excitability of the nations, arising from this stale of things, well suited 

 to the introduction of another grand cycle of divine providence. — 

 The march of political events demanded all the care of the wise and 

 great of the world. Their friendship would have embarrassed and their 

 enmity retarded the progress of a sublime faith, which, in its lowly 

 wanderings, began its pilgrimage among the illiterate and poor. They 

 followed the track of armies, or the plans of the mighty. They knew 

 not that the angels, who watch the world, hung around the foot-prints 

 of a despised Jew, who, when their names and their empire had passed 



