Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/40

 the statesman equally useful : ' thus scornfully summing up the theory of the matter which he found to be held by the politicians of the age which he was describing, and perhaps of his own. Eeligion, as a moral force, died away with the establishment of the Roman Empire, and with it died probity, patriotism, and human dignity, and all that men had learnt in nobler ages to honour and to value as good. Order reigned unbroken under the control of the legions. Industry flourished, and natural science, and most of the elements of what we now call civilisation. Ships covered the seas. Huge towns adorned the Imperial provinces. The manners of men became more arti- ficial, and in a certain sense more humane. Religion was a State establishment — a decent acknowledg- ment of a power or powers which, if they existed at all, amused themselves in the depths of space, care- less, so their deity was not denied, of the woe or weal of humanity : the living fact, supreme in Church and State, being the wearer of the purple, who, as the practical realisation of authority, assumed the name as well as the substance. The one god immediately known to man was thenceforth the Divus Csesar, whose throne in the sky was waiting empty for him till his earthly exile was ended, and it pleased him to join or rejoin his kindred divinities. It was the era of atheism — atheism such as this earth never witnessed before or since. You who have read Tacitus know the practical fruits of it, as they appeared at the heart of the system in the second Babylon, the proud city of the seven hills.