the vast empire of Rome;—like a heavenly flame, it ran through all life, kindling, where it found congenial sympathy, all that it touched into a kindred fervour. Hence, along with that mighty spirit of love which produced so rapid a spread of the Christian religion, and which united in the closest bonds the first Christian communities, that energy of faith which inspired such heroic fortitude under the dreadful and oft renewed persecutions of the Romans. The first persecution under Nero was only a momentary freak of blood-thirsty tyranny—a passing trait of that monster’s cruelty. The first regular edict against the Christians in the Roman empire was passed by Domitian in the 87th year of our era, and, according to a custom which had been borrowed from the Jews, he assimilated the offence of dissent from the national religion to the crime of high treason. The better Nerva softened the rigour of this law, and declared that the denunciations of slaves against their masters were not to be received, but, on the contrary, such informers were to be severely punished. Trajan

also, on the before-mentioned report of the younger Pliny, decided, in the 120th year of our era, that the Christians, who were then uncommonly numerous, were not to be sought after, but that, when denounced, they should be punished according to the law existing against such religious associations and communities. But notwithstanding all these apparent mitigations of severity introduced by the better emperors, the criminal jurisprudence of the Romans, like their foreign warfare, ever remained most atrocious; and the passages and allusions which are to be found in ancient historians, concur with the general voice of Christian tradition in stating the prodigious cruelties inflicted on the Christians in those persecutions. In general Hadrian pursued that milder and middle course of policy which Trajan had commenced before him; he approved of legal and judicial persecutions against the Christians, but he strictly prohibited those tumultuary attacks which were the mere ebullitions of popular hatred. With many vicissitudes, Christianity remained in this state until the reign of Diocletian, who, pursuing a far more systematic plan than most of his predecessors, attempted entirely to root it out; but this was no longer possible, and the growing church received its first formal edict of pacification at the hands of the emperor Constantine. The pagan enthusiast Julian attempted a second time to subvert it, but it was now too late. In the struggle against pagan cruelty and Roman

persecution, Christianity had come off victorious; in bondage, and under every species of suffering, it had proved the invincible might of the divine arm;—and, next to the apostles, the martyrs, so highly revered by the gratitude of Christians, must occupy the second place among those who were instrumental in bringing about this mighty renovation of society, and who sealed their efforts with their blood. But we must not imagine that the martyrs, as mere men, and by their unassisted strength, could have endured such dreadful torments with such unshaken constancy; or, again, that they were the mere unconscious instruments of a divine fatality, without the co-operation of their free, clear and steadfast will. By the side of those who were constant, many individuals were found that were not so,—many, who, overcome by suffering, delivered up the holy scriptures, or entirely apostatized from the faith and sacrificed to idols; so that it was afterwards a matter of dispute, how far the lapsed could be pardoned and received again into the church.

After that period was past which had witnessed the reign of those inhuman tyrants that immediately succeeded Augustus, several of the more virtuous emperors sought by various expedients to bring about the moral regeneration of the people and empire of Rome. Trajan, who possessed much of the rectitude and old martial virtues that belonged to the elder and better period of Rome, sought to introduce these again;

and, though the effects of his policy were transient, they were still beneficial. Hadrian endeavoured to reanimate paganism, and to make it once more the basis of the empire and of public life; for this purpose, he had recourse especially to the more profound and austere Theology of Egypt; and that new Egyptian style, which characterizes the later monuments of Roman art, was connected with the emperor’s predilection for the old religion of Egypt. But the healthy vigour, the moral regeneration, of public life, and of the empire itself, could not now be obtained by the maintenance, or firmer consolidation, of the pagan religion; on the contrary, it is in the erroneous nature of the primitive paganism of Rome that we must seek for the principal cause why, even in that elder period now so highly extolled, and which certainly was at least better, a true, pure, and stable system of morals and politics could never take root and flourish. Under the two Antonines, the severe morality of Stoicism was regarded as the vital principle of moral regeneration, and political reform, and a practical application of its principles was sought for on all sides. And certainly if the stoical philosophy, with its mere dead letter of rigid justice, and correct morality, unsupported by the divine maxims of right faith, and that spirit of exalted love which true faith alone can impart, could have accomplished this high design;—if it had possessed within itself this mighty source, this creative energy of moral

and social life; the serious determination and personal virtues of those imperial stoics might indeed have promised to the declining age of Rome the fulfilment of the last hope to which Paganism yet clung. But that which doth not rest on the basis of truth can receive no life from any external cause; and it can impart no life to any thing without, because it is decayed within, and when the illusive bloom of first youth has fled, it sinks inevitably into its native corruption. “When the Lord doth not build the house,” saith the Psalmist, “those who would build it labour in vain.” To the better times that had witnessed the rule of the three or four great monarchs we have mentioned, the reign of a Commodus succeeded; and thus the Empire, down to the time of Diocletian, beheld a constant mutation of rulers, sometimes benevolent, or at least comparatively good, whose reigns however were often but of short duration, sometimes weak and spiritless, and sometimes again tyrants of the most abject and atrocious cast. Among these latter Sovereigns, however, who in cruelty and arbitrary caprice, resembled the first successors of Augustus, there were no characters possessed of that strong Roman sense which distinguished Tiberius; and the empire in their hands assumed daily more and more a thoroughly effeminate and oriental complexion.

Nothing was more subject to chance than the right of succession in the Roman empire, where the arbitrary application of the Roman

principle of adoption opened a wide field to the contention of parties; without including the frequent recurrence of conspiraces in a military empire, which, as it was formed by a military conspiracy, ever retained the stamp of its origin. Augustus had employed his whole life, not without apparent success, for a time at least, in endeavouring to give to authority, acquired by force of arms, the colour and forms of legitimacy. But how could it be ever forgotten that he, as well as Cæsar, had been raised to the Imperial throne by the army, and amid the struggles of factions, conspiracies, and civil wars. The soldiers knew