Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/33



did military glory, literature, science, art, commerce, and the whole common weal, so flourish and advance, as under the imperial Augustus, the sage Vespasian and the amiable Titus, the heroic Trajan, the polished Adrian, or the wise and philosophic Antonines? Never did Rome wear the aspect of a truly majestic city, till the imperial pride of her long line of Caesars had filled her with the temples, amphitheaters, circuses, aqueducts, baths, triumphal columns and arches, which to this day perpetuate the solid glory of the founders, and make her the wonder of the world, while not one surviving great work of art claims a republican for its author.

To such a glory did the Caesars raise her, and from such a splendor did she fade, as now.

"Such is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,— First freedom, and then glory—when that fails,  Wealth, vice, corruption,—barbarism at last, And history, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page."

An allusion to such a man, in such a book as this, could not be justified, but on this satisfactory ground;—that the changes which he wrought in the Roman government, and the conquests by which he spread and secured the influence of Roman civilization, seem to have done more than any other political action could do, to effect the general diffusion, and the perpetuity of the Christian faith. A glance at these great events, in this light, will show to us the first imperial Caesar, as Christ's most mighty precursor, unwittingly preparing the way for the advance of the Messiah,—a bloody and all-crushing warrior, opening the path for the equally resistless triumphs of the Prince of Peace. Even this striking characteristic, of cool and unscrupulous ambition, became a most glorious means for the production of this strange result. This same moral obtuseness, too, about the right of conquest, so heinous in the light of modern ethics, but so blameless, and even praise-worthy in the eyes of the good and great of Caesar's days, shows us how low was the world's standard of right before the coming of Christ; and yet this insensibility became, in the hands of the God who causes the wrath of man to praise him, a doubly powerful means of spreading that faith, whose essence is love to man.

Look over the world, then, as it was before the Roman conquest, and see the difficulties, both physical and moral, that would have attended the universal diffusion of a new and peaceful religious faith. Barbarous nations, all over the three continents, warring with each other, and with the failing outworks of civilization,—-besotted tyranny, wearing out the energies of its subjects, by selfish and all-grasping folly,—sea and land swarming with marauders, and every wheel of science and commerce rolling backward or breaking down. Such was the seemingly re