perience of various peoples, where natural religion seemed nearly if not wholly, to touch the level of revelation; where the primitive conception of God had been so comparatively worthy and high that the subsequent descent from it appears almost incred ible: the monotheism being lost so utterly in the multitude of divinities; the adoration of contemplation, or the solemn ancestral ritual of sacrifice, giving place so completely to frivolous, licentious, or obscene customs of what was called worship. But these customs were now so established that only a radical and world-wide revolution of thought and feeling could displace them. Cicero, and Seneca, with many others, recognized and rebuked the tendency of men, instead of bringing the Divine to the human, to attribute their own sins to the gods: till such were encouraged, and seemed authorized, from on high. The testimony of Herodotus, Strabo, and others, as to the infamous usages of worship in Babylon and in Egypt, is sufficiently familiar. The voluntary sacrifice of virtue by woman was accepted as an offering dear to the gods; and a sensuality so fright ful that Christendom could not bear its story, if the veil of the ancient language were lifted, had become part of the ritual of religion on the Nile and the Euphrates.

It was said of the Greeks by Apuleius that they differed from the Egyptians in that they honored their gods by dances, which the Egyptians replaced with lamentations. The lighter and more fanciful spirit of the Greek is suggested by the remark. But in one respect they were certainly alike, in their readiness to instal the animal lusts among services of religion: so that Strabo tells us, you remember, that the wealth of Corinth proceeded largely from the foul hire of prostitution in the temples; and Athenæus records that to the prayers of the temple-courtesans, as well as to the valor of the heroes of Marathon, the Corinthians ascribed the great Persian repulse. Even statues of such courtesans had honored and eminent place in the temples. Gibbon himself—who looked at whatever was not Christianity with passionless and discerning eyes-has given the world in his Twenty-third chapter a slight but a fearfully significant sketch of the license in worship which prevailed in Antioch: where pleasure, as he says, assumed the character of religion, and

where "the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians."*

All

In Roman worship, as publicly practiced, an equal licentiousness was not unknown. The Roman nature was haughty and restrained. For a hundred and seventy years after the city waз founded the gods had been worshipped without statues; and religion, with that conquering and political people, was always a vast and elaborate public art, by which to compel the services of the gods on behalf of the city. Yet Ovid and Juvenal set pictures before us of fearful significance; and Seneca complained that men uttered the most abominable prayers in the ears of the gods, so that what a man ought not to hear they did not blush to speak to the Deity: while to the general multitude of worshippers he attributed indecency, and virtual insanity, adding that only the number of such secured for them the reputation of reason. gods had come to be recognized as local. The oracle at Delphi had authorized the maxim that the best religion was that of a man's own city. The noblest of the divinities were not imagined to take any interest in human virtue. The most popular stories current about them were the frightful and depraving legends which rehearsed their furious passions and amours. The Christian Fathers, in their most passionate appeals against idol-worship, had only to repeat what was commonly accepted in the popular notion. Indeed, the most dismal superstitions were coming to take the place of any semblance of faith: as Tiberius put his trust in laurel-leaves to protect him from lightning; as the Emperor Nero, Uhlhorn reminds us, 'having become tired of the goddess Astarte, worshipped no longer any god, but an amulet which had been given him-the ruler of the world becoming the devotee of a fetish.'+

In this terrific condition of things, three controlling tendencies appeared, each of which we must recognize to bring before us the fearful arena into which the new force of Christianity entered. The first is, the increasing atheistic or pantheistic unbelief of

"Decline and Fall, etc.," London ed., 1848, Vol. III., pp. 175–7, 196. +"Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," New York ed., 1879

philosophers in any personal God at all-in any God, except an indefinite principle of order, or a lambent fire-soul of the uni verse. The sad words of the elder Pliny have been often re ferred to, in which he utters his blinding doubt whether there be any God at all, distinct from the world or the sun-and counts it at any rate a foolish delusion to suppose that such an infinite Spirit, if there be one, would concern himself with the affairs of men. It is difficult to say, he thinks, whether it were not better for men to be wholly without a religion than to have one of this kind. He concludes with the lament that nothing is certain save the absence of certainty. He speaks respectfully of the opinion then beginning to prevail, which attributes events to the influence of the stars; and he breaks into the passionate saying that the best thing bestowed upon man is the power to take his own life.

So Varro is reported to have held that the only thing true in religion is the idea of a soul of the world, by which all things are moved and governed; and Seneca speaks, as quoted by Augus tine, of that ignoble crowd of gods which the superstition of ages has collected, in the worship of whom the wise man will join only as remembering that it is matter of custom, not due to reality, as commanded by the laws, not as pleasing to the gods. The Epicureans, represented by Lucretius, practically denied all gods, made the outward world and the soul of man the necessary result of a play of atoms, and esteemed it the chief end of philosophy to banish as illusory, or brand as fictitious, all forms of religious belief.

The Stoical school, whose original teachings show so much of the semblance of Hebrew conceptions as almost to justify the suspicion of many that Zeno and Cleanthes had learned what was written in the Law and the Prophets,-this had become, if it were not at the outset, essentially pantheistic. Traces of this meet us plainly in Seneca; and a scornful Pyrrhonism appeared the only philosophical refuge from atheism on the one hand or pantheism on the other. Even Plato-who, according to Justin Martyr, had learned of the Hebrew faith in Egypt-had said in the Timaeus that it was hard to find the Creator of the Universe and that when he was found it would hardly be possible to make

him evident to all; and the aristocratic tendency of the ancient philosophy, represented in the remark, made such conceptions of any unseen supernal unity as philosophers might attain without effect on the general mind. All such speculations, to the common understanding, were, as the sneering Caligula said of Seneca's eloquence, 'sand without lime.' When Cicero, therefore, wrote his Scipio's Dream, or Seneca his Natural Questions, when Strabo said-imposing his own thought upon Mosesthat the one highest Being is that which we call heaven, the universe, and the nature of things, when Marcus Aurelius long afterward said, but in the same spirit, 'the man of instructed and modest mind says obediently to Nature, who gives all and takes it again, Give what thou wilt, and take back what thou wilt,** or when Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist apostle, said in dying that he 'should try to convey back the divine in man to the divine in the universe 't-there was nothing in all this to make the impression of a vital Divine Unity on the popular mind. The conception of that had no distinct hold on the thoughts even of philosophers; and they were almost as distinctly atheistic-if theism imply faith in a creative Person-as had been the religion of Buddha at the outset, or the ethical instruction of Confucius.

A primitive monotheism, general in the world, is indicated as probable by many facts: among Romans, Greeks, Orientals, Hindus, the earliest inhabitants of Egypt or of China. But it had certainly come to pass in the day when Christianity broke upon the empire that the world by wisdom knew not God. What Duncker says of Brahman might have been said of the very highest conception of God then obtaining among the thoughtful : it was "a soul-less World-soul" which they recognized. Lightfoot has tersely expressed the fact, when, after a large and candid summary of the maxims of Stoicism and of its principles, he says in his Commentary on the Letter to the Philippians, "The supreme God of the Stoics had no existence, distinct from external nature." This was true; and the thin veil of mysti.

"Meditations," X. 14.

| Neander's "History of the Church": Boston ed., 1851 : Vol. I., p. 31 "History of Antiquity," IV., 546. $ p. 294.

cism here and there thrown over the stony system does not dis guise its essentially cold and hard materialism.

With this tendency in the philosophical minds was simul taneously shown a wide and swift decay of faith concerning the gods among the people, especially in the cities; so that the ancient rites of worship became objects of public sarcasm; so that Horace describes the manufacture of a god in a style as contemptuous as that of Isaiah or Jeremiah; so that Froude, it would seem, hardly exaggerates when he says that in the time of Cæsar 'the Roman people had ceased to believe: the spiritual quality was gone out of them: and the higher society of Rome was simply one of powerful animals.'* A certain apprehension that there might be Powers, unseen yet near, whom it was at least not safe to offend, still kept men to the performance of some rites of religion. But Livy-writing at about the time of the Lord's advent-complained of that neglect of the gods which even then widely prevailed. The tendency in later times only increased. The constant introduction of new gods into Rome from Egypt and the East, the portentous syncretism which filled the pantheon with a promiscuous crowd of divinities from all the earth, show how lightly the old ones had come to be regarded; while in Greece-where Aristophanes, conservative as he was, had burlesqued the gods with riotous ridicule at the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries the religious processions were greeted by the populace with mocking gibes. It may perhaps with reason be doubted whether the vehement satire of Juvenal is to be taken as representing exact lines of historical truth; whether the temper of the man, and his pessimistic tendencies, have not surcharged with lurid tints his picture of the times. But there can hardly be room for doubt that he at least approximated the truth when he said that even children had ceased to believe anything about the under-world, and that the priests of august temples could commonly be found in corner-taverns, among sailors and slaves. Indestructible instincts in the soul would not allow nations to become atheistic; but the deified Virtues of the early Romans-Valor, Truth, Clemency, Concord-had ceased to

"Cæsar": New York ed., 1879: p. 18.