LECTURE VIIL

THE picture of the moral life of antiquity at the time when Christianity presented its imperative commands to the worldof that life as exhibited not in remote and uncivilized districts, exceptional in barbarous wickedness, but in the chief centres of culture and of commerce-this is presented, in rapid and incidental touches, but yet with precise and impressive distinctness, in the letters of St. Paul; and probably no one will be tempted to regard his portraiture of it as fanciful or unjust. He was no scholastic recluse, brought suddenly face to face with the actual spirit and conduct of mankind. He was a man of robust nature, experienced in affairs, conversant with the customs of different peoples, by no means insensible to the manifold elements of grace and of grandeur in the ancient civilizations: a man of clear-sighted practical sense, who was prompt to recognize each point of support for the religion which he preached in the history, the letters, or the moral education, of those whom he addressed; who was even regarded by some fastidious disciples as ready to interpret Christianity too largely, and to be too tolerant of the errors of his hearers, that he might fulfil more completely his vast and fruitful mission to the Gentiles.

What this observant and practiced man, of keen intelligence, large experience, and wide observation, incidentally or directly tells us of those whose acceptance of the Faith which he taught he is eager to win, we may without demur accept. At least we may be sure that he has not forgotten his own common-sense so far as to outrage the hearts of his readers, and to instantly repulse their judgment, by painting themselves, or society around them, in colors too sombre. Read then, in the light of this, his unquestioned letters to the Corinthians, who had been withdrawn

largely through the influence of his eager eloquence, from the vices of the heathenism in which most of them had been trained, and see in that vivid ancient silhouette how fierce and flagrant the old wickedness was!

Remember that Corinth was at that time an intellectual capital of Greece, as well as its dependent political centre; that in it stood the grandest temples of that luxurious and decorated order which had taken its name from the famous city; that the Isthmian games were there still celebrated; and that not only particular schools, or eminent teachers, had distinction in and around it, but the city itself was renowned in the world for its polished learning, and its cultivated fondness for instruction and research. Among those, then, in this city, who have distinctly, with revo lutionary action, come out from the defilements, whatever they may have been, of ancestral religions, what is the present moral attainment? how much, if anything, of the earlier dross still clings to the very image of the Lord, as formed amid the heats of conviction and consecration in their softened and stimulated souls? what indications are thus given of the previous character of their custom and spirit?

I need not remind you what witness is borne, or with what emphasis it is borne, on either of these points, by the earliest of these letters. The old sensuality, which had in other times had religious consecration by its intimate connection with the temple-rites of Aphrodite, had so infected the nature of the converts that Christ himself, the Lord of purity, had not wholly deliv ered them from it. Profligacy was defended, on the ground of Christian liberty. The orgiastic feasts of the heathen still drew to themselves Christian disciples, in temples defiled with every lust. The solemn and pathetic Supper of the Lord was degraded into a drunken carousal, or at best a secular feast. The spirit of faction raged with such violence as to despoil worship of sig nificance and of order. Finally, a man who had done what paganism itself could not but reprobate, in contracting an incestuous marriage, was tolerated in the Christian society, and had the passionate support of many of its members.

These facts are not recited by the apostle as things alleged, of which proof may be needed. They are referred to as familiarly

known, as constituting the very occasion of his writing from the distant Ephesus, amid the fertile Asian meadows; and his second letter shows the fear which he had had lest his rebuke should prove ineffective. The question then inevitably comes: 'If this were the condition of those who had actively come out from heathenism, because a something higher in their nature had been reached by the startling appeals of Christianity, what must have been the preceding life from which they had emerged? what must have continued to be the life of those who clung with unshaken tenacity to the ancient cultus, and to the attractive and canonized vices which it sanctioned and garnished?' The answer to these questions involves the whole terrific story of ancient manners.

But if we wish this set before us, not incidentally, but in a definite face to face portrait, we turn of course to the letter to the Romans, and read again the awful words in which the apostle, in the first three chapters, but especially in the first, depicts, as with pencil tipped with fire, the terrible scene on which he looked. The simplicity and thorough fidelity to truth in his lurid delineations would scarcely impress us as they ought-these would surely, I think, seem over-charged-if the parallel accounts of secular historians did not sustain them; did not add, indeed, emphatic illustration to each principal point in his sad and stern indictment. This was what the old civilization had come to, in its ultimate fruitage! Here was the result of what philosophy had inculcated, of what religion had enjoined, of what art, commerce, and government had done, to restrain and refine, to ennoble and invigorate the nature of man. Let us draw near, and see what it is, this ancient life: not now as depicted by Paul, but as illustrated by the men themselves born in it, and who could not be its unfriendly critics; by men who no more thought at the time of the apostle, or for many years after, of coming out from it, through the acceptance of any new Faith, than they thought of jumping from the planet. Let Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the others, be our teachers. Then we may see, through their eyes, in a measure at least, what was the festering and feculent morass, poisonous, malefic, rank with corruption, into which the new religion burst, and through which

it poured its sudden current of quickening and transforming life If it did not wholly purify, it at least did something toward sweetening and cleansing, the foul habit of society. And if it was the teaching of a mere Jewish peasant which accomplished this effect, it is surely the most remarkable phenomenon in the moral history of mankind.

The Roman nature, it must be remembered, if hard and coarse in comparison with the Greek, was also relatively vigorous and simple. It had more of self-restraint, and of moral vigi lance. Less picturesque, it was more practical, resolute, and robust; less addicted to delicate thought, it was more devoted to public affairs, and to the justice which guarantees welfare. In a measure this moral tendency survived, through changes of manners and vicissitudes of history; so that, down to the last, there were those in Rome who amid the pageants of imperial pomp delighted to recall the time when the founders of the Republic had dressed in rough raiment, and had taken counsel, not under marble porticoes and roofs, but in green meadows, beneath the open and lucid heavens; or when one who had been twice a consul, as Augustine long after was glad to remember, had been expelled from the Senate by the Censor, for undue luxury, because he was found to possess ten pounds weight of silver-ware.* The reed-thatched hut of Romulus, or what passed for such, was still preserved on the Palatine hill, while gorgeous structures rose around it; and Augustus himself had only bought there the house of Hortensius, and lived in a simple and manly dignity. There was no very sensitive instinct of righteousness in the empire. The Latin "conscientia" had not meant what we call the moral sense, until a late period, any more than had the Greek "suneidēsis." Each represented, primarily, only conscious intelligence of anything. But the patriotic virtues were naturally in high estimation in Rome. The ideal of character, in the day of Cato or of Cicero, was caught from the hardy Stoical conception. Indeed, the dominant tone of philosophical thought in the imperial city, when Christianity first was preached there, was peculiarly Stoical; and the doctrines and precepts of Zeno and Cleanthes had an accept

* "Civit. Dei "; V.: 18.