THE WORr.n AT THE ADVENT. 221 



Combined with this intellectual character of the age, its tolerant 

 spirit was of high importance. Liberty within certain limits was un- 

 bridled. Bigotry had ceased to be a legalized thing. Rome forbade no 

 gods, that did not interfere with their political policy, or the quiet of the 

 State. They cared not whether a man believed in one god or in twenty 

 gods, so that he broke nobody's leg, and picked nobody's pocket. — 

 Her liberality, it is true, was like that of the sceptic statesman in whose 

 'language we have couched her principles, and perhaps like that of 

 a majority, both of liberal christians and liberal infidels. She was 

 liberal because she was indifferent. She tolerated all religions because 

 she believed heartily in none. The same word expresses religion and 

 superstition. The gods had begun to be out of date. Jupiter's thun- 

 derbolts ceased to dart through any other heaven than that of the poet's 

 fancy. Olympus had become a sad collection of deformed deities, com- 

 pletely without character or clothing ; the wits had stripped them of 

 both, without however always securing either for themselves. 



This state of things was not, it is true, the best conceivable for the 

 reception of Christianity — but it is the best which we could rationally 

 expect under the circumstances. It is bad enough, it is true, to have 

 men listen to you, with the purpose of laughing at you, but it is far 

 worse, if they listen, with the design of cutting your throat or roasting 

 you when you are done. The persecutions which the Christians en- 

 dured, were not because they presented a new religion, but because 

 they desired to subvert that which existed. This was resisted as a part 

 of state policy, and some, though far fewer than is popularly supposed, 

 suffered martyrdom. The truth is, Christianity had more to dread 

 from the incredulity, than the persecution of the age — and it is no trifling 

 argument of her divine origin that she advanced in an age so infidel in 

 its tendencies. 



Even the people were catching the looseness, — for the fittest way to 

 make men cease to believe, is to give them too much to believe. Not 

 a child, says Juvenal, old enough to wash itself believes that there are 

 ghosts and the realms beneath the ground, the boat-pole of Charon, and 

 the black frogs in the river Styx, or that so many thousands pass over 

 in one boat. And to this heathen universal ism he ascribes that terri- 

 fic corruption of morals which prevailed at Rome. Heathenism itself 

 had a deeper depth, and into that depth, modern infidelity, in the name 

 of Christ and of the Father of mercies, would plunge us. 



But did not the higher conceptions of philosophers, and the purer 

 strains of poets take from the doctrine of the gods much of its absur- 

 dity, and throw a classic beauty around what they could not destroy .•' 



