Chapter II: Part 2

'What was the life that Rome bestowed upon her inhabitants?
Judge of it by the gift of an emperor to his people; of
such gifts there were many in Rome. A vast square, of more
than a thousand feet, comprehended within its various
courts three great divisions. One contained libraries,
picture and sculpture galleries, music halls, and every
need for the cultivation of the mind. A second, courts for
gymnastics, riding, wrestling, and every bodily exercise. A
third, the baths; but how little the word, associated with
modern poverty conveys a notion of the thing! There were
tepid, vapour, and swimming baths, accompanied with
perfumes and frictions, giving to the body an elastic
suppleness. [We believe the author has omitted the chief
thing conveyed to a Roman by the term, viz., what we now
call the Turkish bath, dry heat, producing perspiration.]
Then, as to their material: alabaster vied with marble;
mosaic pavements, with ceilings painted in fresco; walls
were encrusted with ivory, and a softened daylight
reflected from mirrors; while on all sides a host of
servants were engaged in the various offices of the bath.
The afternoon _siesta_ is over; a bell sounds, the _thermæ_
open. There all Rome assembles, to chat, to criticise, to
declaim. There is the coffee-house, theatre, exchange,
palace, school, museum, parliament, and drawing-room, in
one. There is food for the mind, exercise and refreshment
for the body. There, if anywhere, the eye can be satisfied
with seeing, and the ear with hearing; and every sense and
every taste find but a too ready gratification. This feast
of intellect, this palace of ancient power and art is open
daily, without cost, or for the smallest sum, to every
Roman citizen. Private wealth in modern times bestows a few
of these gifts on a select number; but poor as well as rich
could revel in them, without fear of exhaustion, in this
treasure-house of material civilization.'

We have enlarged on the material blessings enjoyed under the Roman Empire, because, as we began by saying, we are convinced that the mass, even of those who have received a classical education, have never sufficiently estimated them. But it is curious, on the other hand, to observe how much the judgment even of the most learned and thoughtful men, whose standard of excellence was merely earthly, has been dazzled when they have allowed themselves seriously to consider them. Gibbon goes so far as to say, 'If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.'

The great poet of the last generation mourns over the fall of Rome--

'Alas! the golden city, and alas!
The trebly kindred triumphs.'

He laments over fallen earthly greatness:

'Dost thou flow,
Old Tiber, through a marble wilderness?
Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress.'

So laments the world over fallen worldly greatness and glory. Our own estimate of the matter is the very opposite. We know, indeed, that the time was coming, and coming apace, in which not only the great city and its empire, but all the greatness and glory of the old heathen world was to be so utterly swept away, that for weeks together the very spot where Rome had once stood remained untrodden by any human foot, and abandoned to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. But in all this we see nothing over which any man need lament, unless, indeed, he esteems mere material prosperity above all that is truly noble and exalted in man. Rather are we disposed to cry out with exultation--

'Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become the
habitation of devils, and hold of every foul spirit, and a
cage of every unclean and hateful bird.--The kings of the
earth shall bewail over her, and lament for her, when they
shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for
the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas! that great
city Babylon, that mighty city,... which was clothed in
fine linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold
and precious stones and pearls.--Rejoice over her, thou
heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath
avenged you on her!'

For, in truth, all this splendour and luxury was not merely associated, but inseparably one with a moral system, by far the most execrable, the most indescribable, the most inconceivable, under which God's earth ever groaned. The morals of the accursed race were far too foul to be described here. They became the wonder and loathing, the byword of contempt even of the heathen barbarians by whom they were surrounded.[5] Lust, not merely unbridled, but wearing out and jading itself to invent new ways of pollution; and cruelty, shedding man's blood like water--these were the very foundations of the gorgeous fabric. Any cure for these evils, except in the total sweeping away of the whole order of society, was, as we shall soon see, utterly hopeless.

First of all, the prosperity which we have described was only the privilege of a favoured class. The mass of the population derived from it no benefit. The whole social system was founded on slavery. The whole domestic service, nay, the manufacturing, and what is to modern ideas far more marvellous, even the intellectual labour, was performed by slaves. It is calculated that in Rome itself the slave population was twice or three times as numerous as the free. These slaves were drawn from races fully equal to their masters in natural gifts, they were often their equals even in culture; and every one of these slaves was by Roman law not a person, but a thing. The male slave was not a man, the female slave not a woman. 'The slave is without rights, without a family, without a God.'[6] The hideous moral pollution which this state of law not merely rendered possible, but consecrated, is defended from exposure in the language of a Christian country by its unutterable, inconceivable foulness; and of the moral system of heathen Rome, as a whole, the same must be said. It is like the beast of the American prairies, which no hunter dare touch because it emits a stench which none can endure. We are well aware that this of necessity prevents our exhibiting this side of the question with anything like justice. Let us thank God that, far as our age has fallen beneath the standard of Christianity, it is still so much pervaded by Christian instincts that no writer, not even the most utterly abandoned in his personal character, would dare to publish to the world what was practised without shame or concealment by men who were esteemed free from reproach and models of virtue. 'It is a shame even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.' Thus much, however, we may say, that the men whom the heathen Romans honoured, not merely for greatness, but especially for virtue, lived without shame in all the horrors described by St. Paul in that terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; and poets, as deeply pervaded as man ever was with a sense of the beautiful, nay, who undertook to be the moral reformers of their age, introduced into the midst of their most delicious strains not mention merely, but praises of things which the moral standard of our age forbids us to mention--even for execration; for these are they of whom the Apostles testifies that 'they not only do such things, but have pleasure in them that do them.'

Neither must we look upon slavery, and the indescribable system of pollution which it sprang from, as an evil accidentally attached to heathen society. It was intimately and essentially mixed with its very life. It is important to observe that, so far as we know, there has never existed upon earth any purely heathen civilized society of which slavery has not been the basis. There is no reason to suppose that if the Roman Empire had continued in all its greatness to the present day, and had continued heathen, slavery would at this hour have been a less essential part of its social and moral system than it was in the days of Nero. Before it could have been abandoned, the whole habits of life of all the free population of the Empire, and especially of Rome, must have been fundamentally changed; and the change must have been such that we can hardly imagine any nation to have been reconciled to it except by some superhuman power; for it would have implied the sacrifice of all the habits of self-indulgence and luxury upon which Roman society was built. It is impossible to suppose that such a change could have been effected, especially because, as far as experience teaches, there never has been any instance of a heathen nation which has begun to fall into decay and has been raised in any degree to a new life. Such a national resurrection is one of the miracles which nothing except Christianity has ever worked.

As to the barbarity of which the slave at Rome was the victim, we might speak with less reserve if our space allowed. But we can devote only a few words to a subject which would fill volumes. We will, then, confine ourselves to suggesting two subjects for the consideration of our readers,--first, the wholesale slaughter, merely for amusement, which was one of the most cherished and universally diffused institutions of Roman society, and was the delight of women as well as men; next the state of the law with regard to slaves, and the manner in which it was administered. The life of a Roman was of course always held subject to the despair of his slaves, and hence it was the law, that if a master was killed by his slave, under whatever circumstances, or for whatever cause, every one of his slaves, male and female, old and young, however manifestly innocent of all complicity in the murder, however without power to have prevented it, was to die upon the cross.[7] Tacitus tells how, in the reign of Nero, even the populace of Rome was horrified at the execution of this law in the case of the 'family,' as it was called, of a man of consular dignity murdered by one of his slaves, it was reported, in consequence of rivalry in a matter of infamous passion, or because the master had received the price of his slave's freedom and then refused to fulfil his engagement by giving him his liberty. His slaves were four hundred in number; among them were not only men and women, but little children, and the matter was brought before the Senate by some who wished to temper in this instance the severity of the law. But the proposal was indignantly rejected by Cassius, a Roman of noble family, and whom the philosophic historian Tacitus expressly praises for his knowledge of the laws of Rome. He argued that although in this case the innocent would perish with the guilty, this must happen even when a legion was punished by decimation, and that if some injustice was committed, it would be outweighed by the public benefit. But his chief argument was the authority of ancestral law:

'Our ancestors were wiser than we. I have often abstained
from resisting proposals to dispense with their laws, when
I felt that the change would be for the worse, lest I
should seem to be carried away by love of my profession.
To-day I cannot abstain. They suspected the disposition of
their slaves, even when they had been born in the same
lands and houses, and bred up in affection for their lords.
But since we have begun to have in our families whole
nations who have different customs, different religious
rites, or none at all, this confused sediment of all
peoples can be mastered only by terror.'

His arguments prevailed, and the whole four hundred, men, women, and children, were sent to execution. The indignation of the populace was overawed by soldiers supplied by the Emperor.

We have only indicated, not described the hideous state of Roman society; what is really important is to observe, that man being what he is, this monstrous system of blood and pollution must not be regarded as any accidental evil; it was the natural, we do not hesitate to say, the certain consequence of a high state of wealth, civilization, and refinement in a heathen society. So far as we are aware, there is no record of any heathen nation which has ever attained to such a condition, in which moral corruption has not overflowed all bounds, and in the end destroyed the nation itself. Wealth, leisure, luxury, are of necessity temptations to an easy, indulgent life. To this the experience of Christian nations forbids us to shut our eyes. But in them, however far they may have fallen below the practical standard of Christianity, unless all faith in the supernatural, in the unseen world, in God, and in Christ is wholly extinct, there are always fixed recognised principles upon which to fall back; and there is a part at least of every nation resolved to act on these principles, at all cost and all sacrifice. These are they to whom our blessed Lord said, 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' In a heathen society, on the contrary, when corruption once breaks loose, where is the salt? There may be men like Cato the censor, who believe that the fall of states is usually to be traced, not so much to political as to moral and social causes, and foresee in the decay of morals the ruin of their country. But what are they to do? They may remonstrate, they may argue; but the evil they have to encounter is not in the intellect, but in the will; and the will is exactly that which they have no means of affecting. At Rome, for instance, the danger and evil was not that men denied or doubted that it was only by the stern and self-denying virtues that a State could be preserved, it was that each man for himself preferred indulgence and ease, and despaired of doing anything effectual for the public good, for he felt, very truly, that even if he were, in his own person, to revive all the simplicity and hardness of life of Cincinnatus or Fabricius, he would not be able to change the national habits, or restore to the standard of times gone by. Each, therefore, preferred to praise the rigid virtues of former ages, and to practise the laxity of his own. No man wrote more strongly or more eloquently in praise of ancient manners and in condemnation of modern corruption than Sallust, the historian. Yet no Roman palace equalled in luxury the gardens of Sallust, the man. Nor was any Roman less scrupulous either in getting money or in spending it. What, then, was to be done? The power of passion was real and overpowering; virtue could only oppose to it common-places and fine words, without being able to appeal to any fixed principles or practical sanctions. It was a lamentable state of things, but, as the ancients themselves believed, one which, in the heathen world, followed by a necessary law, whenever any brave, hardy, self-denying, and virtuous race of men, by the natural operation of these virtues, rose to empire, and attained wealth, and the means of luxury. The later Romans held up their own ancestors of early days as the brightest example of virtue. Among them the gods were honoured and worshipped, and the rules which had come down from their fathers were strictly observed. Men were frugal, laborious, content with little, valuing right and honour far above wealth and pleasure, and ever ready to suffer or die for their country; women were chaste, modest, retiring, preferring their honour to their life. That the men and women of their own day were in all respects the opposite, was self-evident; but it is to be observed, that they were so far from considering this to be any special fault or misery of Rome, that even those who most bitterly complained of the change were wont to boast that no other nation had so long resisted the universal law, by which wealth generated luxury, and luxury the desire of increased gain; and this again made money, not honour and virtue, the national standard of right and wrong, until at last, things getting ever worse and worse, society itself was dissolved, and the national life perished. This they considered to be the natural, nay inevitable course of things.[8]

This was a melancholy view of human affairs, but it seems certain that with regard to a heathen state (and they knew of no other) it was true. For to take the case of Rome itself, what sanction was there even in the purest times of the Republic for those rules of right and wrong--those great moral principles, which to a very considerable extent were actually preserved; although, no doubt, men in later times dreamed of a golden age which had never really existed. The only religion they knew was silent about moral virtues. It taught men to honour and worship the gods of their fathers, and to ask and hope from them such worldly blessings as long life, health, &c. But that a man of moral purity, justice, and mercy was a more acceptable worshipper than one who was impure, unjust, and cruel, they never imagined, and indeed, as long as they in any degree believed the traditions which they had received as to the character of the gods they worshipped, it was simply impossible that they should imagine it. There was nothing contrary to the national religion, however men's consciences might tell them that there was something immoral, in the prayer which Horace attributes to one of his contemporaries--'Grant that I may succeed in wearing a mask, that I may be supposed to be just and good. Throw a cloud and darkness over my cheats and frauds.'

Religion, then, gave no moral rule, or at least none to individuals. M. de Champagny ('Les Césars,' iii. p. 4) remarks, with great truth, that so far as it had a moral code at all, that code and its sanctions touched, not the individual man, but the State. Its morality was that of the family, and through the family that of the city. Its object was the prosperity, the glory, the aggrandisement of the public welfare. The Roman virtues--courage in war, moderation in peace, economy in private life, fidelity in marriage, these were patriotic virtues, taught and practised as such.' What, then, was the moral code of the early Romans? It was, as this passage suggests, the fundamental and original law of the Roman people. Arnold well points out[9] that this and this alone was the real moral law of the heathen nations in general. In this sense their only standard of right and wrong was human law; but not exactly what we mean when we speak of human law, because we live in a state of society in which new laws are continually passed; and to imagine that the 'statutes at large' could be the real rule and measure of right and wrong, would go beyond the possible limits of human credulity. But among the ancient nations new laws were comparatively very rare. The Romans themselves had a great system of what Jeremy Bentham used to call 'judge-made law.' This grew to its perfection at rather a late period of the Empire, and still forms the foundation of most of the systems of law existing in Europe. It is not of this, however, that we are speaking. Of what we should call statutes, there were passed in the whole of their history very few. Only 207 in all are recorded as having been enacted in the whole period of the Republic, and of these no less than 133 were passed just at the latest period of its decay.[10] Their greater frequency at this period was considered one of the signs of national degeneracy, for it was a proverb, _corruptissimâ republicâ plurimæ leges_. In fact, at Rome in its best days there can hardly be said to have existed any machinery for making new statutes. There was, as we understand the word, no legislative assembly. The judicial system out of which grew the code of law to which we have referred already existed; and when it was necessary, one of those grave changes which are known among our kindred on the other side of the Atlantic as 'amendments of the constitution,' could be made by a vote of the whole Roman people. To get one of these passed was often, during the best periods of the Republic, a matter requiring years of furious struggle.

It is not, then, of statutes such as are passed year by year in our Parliament that we are speaking, when we say that the law of the land was the chief code of morals existing in heathen States. Quite distinct from anything of this kind, and more answering to our 'common law,' there were certain great principles of the constitution which had come down to the Romans of the historical period by an immemorial tradition, and which all men believed to have in them something sacred. To touch them was to touch the very life of the Roman people. Such principles there were in all the ancient heathen States, and their sacredness was in each State a fundamental principle as long as it retained any fundamental principles at all. This was, in fact, a necessary part of heathenism itself; for the very essence of polytheism is the belief that each people has its own gods, and, therefore, springing from them, its own traditions of right and wrong. From its own gods each people hoped for blessings and prosperity in its national and corporate capacity. To offend or alienate them was to risk the existence of the civil community, and what was the will of the gods of any particular nation was to be learned from the primitive original tradition of that nation.

Thus, the great principles of the ancient Roman morality, such for instance as the sanctity of marriage, parental authority, and the like, were, in the earlier days of the Republic, so mingled in the notions of a Roman with patriotism, that it was impossible to separate them. Adultery in a Roman matron, incontinence in a vestal virgin, was an act of high treason against the common weal of the Roman people. As such, it was monstrous and terrible to the whole people. Every man, every woman, every child, felt it as much a personal injury, as each would have felt the violation of the temples of their country's gods, or the taking away of the palladium or the ancilia. The instance we have selected was that upon which the Romans themselves felt that the whole stability of their country rested. The sanctity of marriage was the principle of the life of the Roman State. In the worst times a poet, himself licentious, recognised corruption on that point as the main cause of the ruin of the country--

'Fecunda culpæ sæcula nuptias
Primùm inquinavere, et genus, et domos
Hoc fonte derivata clades
In patriam populumque fluxit.'

But it would have been easy to mention other moral offences which in their judgment directly threatened the safety of the common country. Such, for instance, was the breach of a treaty, any outrage offered to the sacred person of an ambassador, or even the removal of ancient landmarks.

Thus it was that, in the earlier state of Roman society, the most important moral principles--not to add that, from their nature, conscience confirmed and enforced the national law and feeling--really had an authority as strong as any human sanction can give. To violate them involved loss of caste, and a great deal more. The offenders were regarded as traitors against their country; the very mention of their names would be the most deadly insult to those who had the misfortune to be allied to them by blood or marriage. They became a proverb of reproach. So terrible was this punishment that the law which gave to a husband power of life or death over a guilty wife, and the feeling of the nation which not only justified him in executing it, but required it of him, hardly added to its severity. The virtues which tends to success in war were also enforced by the circumstances of Rome. A State contained within the walls of a single city and surrounded by cities, many of which were as powerful as itself, and with each of which it was liable to be at war, depended for its very existence upon the courage, bodily strength, and military training of all its citizens; and if the city was overcome in war, each of them was likely enough to be sold as a slave, or at the very best to be reduced to a position something like that of a serf. No wonder that under such circumstances consuls and dictators were content to hold the plough, and esteemed the success and victory of their country far more important to each of them than their possessions or their life.

But when Rome became the head of a widespread empire, the preservation of her early traditions became simply impossible. The contemporaries of Augustus well knew that from war (except, indeed, civil war) they had nothing to fear. The men of a generation earlier were no doubt vexed and provoked by the disastrous defeat of Crassus and the destruction of his army; but their personal comfort, nay, their very pride of superiority to all the world, was no way affected by it. How was it possible that they should really feel like their forefathers,

'When Romans in Rome's quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old?'

And, as for the more strictly moral traditions of the early Republicans, they were, from their nature, from the very first, of very limited application. Men who had never learned those glorious truths,

'Which sages would have died to learn,
Now taught by cottage dames,'

that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men on the face of the whole earth,' and (as the corollary from this) that 'God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation, he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,' were by no means offended at the supposition that there was a different rule of morality for men of different nations. Why not, as they had different gods? The virtues, then, on which they insisted, were duties, not of man as man to his Creator, but of Romans to Rome. They prized, not the virtue of chastity, but the honour of the Roman matron; not truth and good faith, but the oath to which the gods of Rome were invoked as witnesses. The chastity of a slave or a freedwoman or even a foreigner, was of no value. Men, to whom the Roman was not bound by an oath taken before the gods of his country, had no rights. It was an essential part of this system that men could not, if they would, transplant themselves at will from the allegiance of the gods and of the moral traditions of their fathers to those of another nation. It was on this principle that in the earliest times marriages between citizens of different cities were forbidden, and for the same reason even those between a patrician of Rome and a plebeian.

Now, when many nations were welded together into a single empire, the whole of this tradition broke down. Arnold remarks it as one great political benefit of Christianity, that by 'providing a fixed moral standard independent of human law, it allows human law to be altered, as circumstances may require, without destroying thereby the greatest sanction of human conduct.' What, then, was the situation of a Roman, when the mingling together of all nations had effectually destroyed all idea of the sanctity of the original traditions of any--his own included--and yet he had found no 'moral standard independent' of them. It is not too much to say that he was left without moral standard at all. Patriotism and the tradition of their fathers had become a name to men who could hardly be said to have any 'fatherland,' and whose country was the civilized world, and they had no higher principle to supply their place.

In this utter break-down of all fixed principles which, in a heathen age, necessarily resulted from the substitution of one great empire for a multitude of minute republics; and in the complete isolation in which it left every individual, when he lost the idea of that duty to his country and his country's traditions which had been the moral law of his ancestors, M. de Champagny sees the explanation of the fact, so hard to account for, that men whose fathers had been proud nobles of free and lordly Rome should have submitted as they did to such a tyranny as that of Tiberius. For his was not one of those which are supported by the sword. In Italy he had only about 9,000 men under arms, and even they were scattered in the neighbourhood of the city. Yet the Senate allowed itself to be decimated, its chief members cut off day by day. It seems as if each man thought only of himself, and calculated that although, of course, none could be safe, he was safer by remaining quiet, and taking his chance, than he would be by boldly appealing to the Senate and people to put an end to the protracted massacre, by depriving the tyrant of his power.

The circumstance which, perhaps, is most revolting to our feelings as Englishmen in the tyranny of the bad Emperor is, that it was hardly possible to draw a line between an execution and an assassination. A great man, untried, nay, so far as he knew, unaccused, was suddenly roused from his sleep by the arrival of half a dozen soldiers, who came to put him to death on the spot, or, perhaps, as a great favour, to bring him the commands of the Emperor that he should kill himself. How does this differ from an assassination, except in the assured impunity of the murderers? Yet, so common was it, that when the Emperor Pertinax was suddenly awakened on the night in which Commodus had been slain, by those who brought him the offer of the purple, he took for granted that he was to die. The feelings with which we regard such proceedings have been formed by the immemorial law of our country (which not even Henry VIII., in his wildest excess of tyranny, ever dared to violate, except in a few cases, in which he obtained an Act of Parliament, to authorize its violation)--that no man can be condemned without trial. The Roman law, during the best days of the Republic, carried the notion of 'strong government' farther than even our neighbours in France would like. Within the walls of Rome there was an appeal to the people from the sentence of any magistrate; everywhere else, a consul or other officer holding the 'imperium' might order whom he pleased to be beheaded by his lictors, without trial. This, no doubt, was because, outside the city, the office of a Roman consul was purely military. But this 'martial law' prepared men's minds for the abuse of the same discretion within the city itself by the Cæsars, whose position, as everybody knows, was, legally, only that they were servants of the Republic, privileged to hold a number of offices at the same time, and for years together. They, therefore, naturally inherited and abused the discretion of the old magistrates.

When such power fell into the hands of a Caligula or a Commodus, who would not take the trouble of governing, it was really little more than an entire exemption of the Cæsars from all law and all restraints. The government seems to have gone on throughout the Roman Empire much as usual. But there was in Rome itself one miserable youth, mad with absolute licence, who could with impunity order the murder of any one whom it struck his fancy to destroy, for any cause, or for no cause, or because he was in want of money, and might take the property of any one he was pleased to murder.

It was but for a time comparatively short that this state of things lasted. Still, under the best reigns, one can hardly doubt, that there must have been an uneasy feeling in the mind of the Emperor, as well as of his subjects, that his successor might renew the times of Caligula or Nero. Under the Antonines, perhaps, when there was a long succession of good governors for more than eighty years without interruption, men may have learned to look back on such things as belonging exclusively to a by-gone age. But they were too soon undeceived, after the death of Marcus Aurelius had left the succession open to his unworthy son. Yet the crimes even of the worst of the Cæsars affected Rome, not the world, and, indeed, in Rome itself, almost exclusively a single class--the senators and the rich. They seem, therefore, hardly to have been considered as an interruption of the general felicity of the Pax Romana; any more than an epidemic of cholera in our own days, which for a moment strikes terror upon the city which it attacks, but is forgotten almost as soon as it passes away.

Nothing so effectually blinds even the naturally clearest sight as moral perversion. Over the very soul of Gibbon, strange to say, this Egyptian darkness brooded so thick, that after intelligently studying this vast, pathetic, and most instructive history, the only practical lesson he drew from it was, that the great corruptor of human society is--_Peace_. He says, 'It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the Empire,' and the effects of this poison he traces in the 'decline of courage and genius, and in general degeneracy.' Strange that he could imagine that war and bloodshed are the only conceivable prophylactics against self-indulgence, luxury, and unmanly sloth. Within the last few months we have had a remarkable proof of the contrary. For fifty years after Waterloo, Prussia enjoyed profound peace. France, to mention no other wars, had a continual school of war in Algeria. Yet, though the French are as brave as the Germans, they have been unable to stand against them for an hour in the present war; because the tone of the governing class and of the army had been undermined by the moral corruption of the Second Empire. Even if war was indispensable, no man knew better than Gibbon that the Roman frontiers were always in a chronic state of war. The lessons really taught by the history of the Roman Empire during the first century and a half, are so plain that one would hardly have thought they could be missed. Here was a great Empire upon which all the best gifts of God, in the purely natural order, had been poured with a lavish hand. It occupied all the fairest, most fruitful, and most illustrious regions of the globe, to which the climate and situation can never fail to attract intelligent travellers from all less favoured countries. The presiding races of that Empire, which gave their character to all the rest, were those whom God had made His instruments to convey to all nations the best gifts of Nature--the Greek, in whom were stored and preserved the richest powers of genius, art, eloquence and philosophy; the Roman, who has been the example and teacher of all nations, in the great principles of stability, law, and order. For the use and enjoyment of this Empire were stored all the accumulated wealth of literature, poetry, learning, philosophy and art, which all ages of the world had produced and treasured up. To complete the whole, it was exempted for generations together from the scourge of war. In one word, it had everything that God could give to man, except the supernatural gifts of Faith, Hope, and Charity. And the result showed, that, without these, all gifts of the natural order, however precious, were unavailing to preserve human society from utter decay and dissolution. It was not broken in pieces by the blows of foreign enemies, but died of its own inherent corruption. The most prominent visible effect of this corruption, which struck the eyes even of heathens, was that man's vices made void the primeval blessing, 'Be fruitful and multiply.' Plutarch, a Greek of the age of Trajan, lamented that all Greece in his day could not supply as many men as one of its smaller cities sent out to war four hundred years earlier. The decline of population in Rome itself was no less rapid and steady. And men died out, not because they were wasted by war, by pestilence, by famine, or by grinding tyranny, but because unrestrained self-indulgence dried up the very sources of increase. If there had been no barbarians to rush in and fill up the void, the Empire would have fallen in pieces for want of life enough to hold it together. Its history proved that the real causes of the ruin of States are not political, but moral and social, and that in nations, as in individuals, the words of the poet are most strictly fulfilled:--

'Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word.
From Thee departing they are lost, and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace;
From Thee is all that soothes the life of man--
His high endeavour, and his glad success,
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.
But oh! Thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Lectures on Modern History.'

[2] A native of Barcelona, who was made head of the French police in 1759, and retired in 1780.

[3] Vol. iii., p. 196. We borrow the translation of a living author.

[4] Details are necessarily omitted, for want of space, in this extract, as well as in the last, the loss of which weakens its force.

[5] See Salvian 'De Gubernatione Dei.'

[6] See a curious collection of passages in the notes to M. de Champagny's chapter on Slavery. ('Les Césars,' vol. iii.)

[7] See Champagny's 'Cæsars,' vol. iii. p. 122.

[8] Thus Livy: 'Ad illa mihi pro se quisque intendat animum, quæ vita qui mores fuerint; per quos viros, quibusque artibus, domi militiæque, et partum et auctum imperium sit. Labente deinde paullatim disciplinâ, velut desidentes primo mores sequatur animo, deinde ut magis magisque lapsi sint; tum ire coeperint præcipites; donec ad hæc tempora, quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus perventum est;' and yet he is so far from considering this an evil peculiar to Rome, that he adds, 'Nulla unquam respublica nec major nec sanctior nec bonis exemplis ditior fuit; nec in quam civitatem tam seræ avaritia luxuriaque immigraverint, nec ubi tantus et tam diu paupertati ac parsimoniæ honos fuerit.'--(_Præfatio._)

[9] 'Roman History,' vol. ii. chap. xxvi.

[10] See Champagny, Appendix, 'Les Césars,' vol. i.

ART. II.--_Theism_--_Desiderata in the Theistic Argument._

It is a philosophical commonplace that all human questioning leads back to ultimate truths which cannot be further analysed, and of which no other explanation can be given than that _they exist_. Every explanation of the universe rests and must rest on the inexplicable. The borders of the known and the knowable are fringed with mystery, and all the data of knowledge recede into it by longer or shorter pathways. Thus, while it is the very mystery of the universe that has given rise to human knowledge, by quickening the curiosity of man, it is the same mystery which prescribes a limit to his insight, which continues to overshadow him in his researches, and to girdle him, in his latest discoveries, with its veil. In wonder all philosophy is born; in wonder it always ends: and, to adopt a well-known illustration, our human knowledge is a stream of which the source is hid, and the destination unknown, although we may surmise regarding both.

But the mystery which thus envelopes the origin and the destination of the universe is not absolutely overpowering; nor does it lay an arrest on the human faculties in their efforts to understand that universe as a whole. Man strives to penetrate farther and farther into the shrine of nature, and records in the several sciences the stages of his progress. These sciences are of necessity inter-related and dependent. Each section of human knowledge has a doorway leading into these on either side, and one which opens behind into the region of first principles. Separate inquirers may content themselves with their special region of phenomena and its laws, which they seek to understand more perfectly and to interpret more clearly, and never so beyond their own domain. It is by such division of labour and concentration of aim that the achievements of modern science have been won. But it is only by forsaking the narrow region, and, without entering the borderland of some new science, receding behind it, and contemplating it from a distance, that its value as a contribution to our knowledge of the universe can be discerned. Each of the sciences has its own ideal, but the goal of universal science is the discovery of one ultimate principle which will be explanatory of all observed phenomenon.

And the speculative thinker has a similar aim. The perennial question of philosophy is the discovery of the central principle of Existence, its haunting problem is the ultimate explanation of the universe of being. The universe--what is it? whence is it? whither is it tending? can we know anything beyond the fleeting phenomena of its ever unfolding and ever varying history? Is its source, and therefore its central principle, accessible to our faculties of knowledge?

And this is the distinctive problem of rational theology. Philosophy and science both lead up to theology as the apex of human knowledge. The latter may be fitly called the _scientia scientiarum_. Questions as to the nature and origin of Life upon our planet, the nature of Force or energy, the problems of Substance and of Cause, the questions of the Absolute and Infinite, all centre in this, are all the several ways of expressing it from the point of view which the questioner occupies, 'What is the ultimate principle of the universe, the ἀρχὴ of all existence?' Speculative philosophy and science deal proximately, it is true, with the problems of finite existence, existence as presented to us in the surrounding universe, and the laws which regulate it; but they covertly imply and remotely lead up to the question we have stated. They are the several approaches to that science which sits enthroned on the very summit of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, the science of speculative theology is as yet lamentably incomplete. We have scores of treatises devoted to the subject, and numerous professed solutions of the problem. But we have not, in the English language, a single treatise which even contemplates a philosophical arrangement and classification of the various theories, actual and possible, upon the subject. It is otherwise with the great questions of intellectual and ethical philosophy. We have elaborate and almost exhaustive schemes of theories on the nature of perception, or our knowledge of the external world, the laws of association, the problem of causality, and the nature of conscience. But we look in vain for any similar attempt to classify the several lines of argument, or possible modes of theistic proof, so as to present a tabular view of the various doctrines on this subject. We are limited to the well-known but precarious scheme of proofs _à priori_ and _à posteriori_,[11] and to the more accurate classification of Kant, the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological proofs, with his own argument from the moral faculty or practical reason. In addition, we are not aware of any English treatise specially devoted to the history of this branch of philosophical literature, with the exception of a brief essay by Dr. Waterland, in which he traverses a small section of the whole area; and that not as the historian of philosophical opinion, but in the interest of a special theory.[12]

The present condition of 'natural theology' in England is scarcely creditable to the critical insight of the British mind. There has been little earnest grappling with the problem in the light of the past history of opinions; and traditionary stock-proofs have been relied upon with a perilous complacency. The majority of theologians trust to an utterly futile and treacherous argument, from what has long been termed 'final causes,' and when beaten from that field, at once by the rigour of speculative thought and the march of the inductive sciences, the refuge that is taken in the region of our moral nature is scarcely less secure, while the character of the theistic argument from conscience is suffered to remain in the obscurity which still shrouds it.

In the following pages we propose to show the invalidity of some of the popular modes of proof, and to suggest a few desiderata in the future working out of the problem.

It may be useful to preface our criticism by a classification of the various theistic theories, rather as a provisional chart of opinion, than as an exhaustive summary of all the arguments which have been advanced, or of all possible varieties in the mode of proof. Many thinkers, perhaps the majority, and notably the mediæval schoolmen, have combined several distinct lines of evidence; and have occasionally borrowed from a doctrine which they explicitly reject some of the very elements of their argument. They have often forsaken their own theory at a crisis, and not observed their departure from the data on which they profess exclusively to build.

The first class of theories are strictly _ontological_ or _ontotheological_. They attempt to prove the objective existence of Deity from the subjective notion of necessary existence in the human mind, or from the assumed objectivity of space and time which they interpret as the attributes of a necessary substance.

The second are the _cosmological_ or _cosmo-theological_ proofs. They essay to prove the existence of a supreme self-existent cause from the mere fact of the existence of the world, by the application of the principle of causality. Starting with the postulate of any single existence whatsoever, the world or anything in the world, and proceeding to argue backwards or upwards, the existence of one supreme cause is held to be 'a regressive inference' from the existence of these effects. As there cannot be, it is alleged, an infinite series of derived or dependent effects, we at length reach the infinite or uncaused cause. This has been termed the proof from contingency, as it rises from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute. But the cosmological proof may have a threefold character, according as it is argued: 1. That the necessary is the antithesis of the contingent; or, 2. That because some being now exists, some being must have always existed; or, 3. That because we now exist and have not caused ourselves, some cause adequate to produce us, must also now exist.

A third class of proofs are somewhat inaccurately termed _physico-theological_, a phrase equally descriptive of them and of those last mentioned. They are rather _teleological_ or _teleotheological_. The former proof started from any finite existence. It did not scrutinise its character, but rose from it to an absolute cause, by a direct mental leap or inference. This scrutinises the effect, and finds traces of intelligence within it. It detects the presence or the vestiges of mind in the particular effect it examines, viz., the phenomena of the world, and from them it infers the existence of Deity. One branch of it is the popular argument from design, or adaptation in nature, the fitness of means to ends implying, it is said, an architect or designer. It may be called _techno-theology_, and is variously treated according as the technologist (α) starts from human contrivance and reasons to nature, or (β) starts from nature's products and reasons toward man. Another branch is the argument from the order of the universe, from the types or laws of nature, indicating, it is said, an orderer or law-giver, whose intelligence we thus discern. It is not, in this case, that the adjustment of means to ends proves the presence of a mind that has adjusted these. But the law itself, in its regularity and continuity, implies a mind behind it, an intelligence animating the otherwise soulless universe. It might be termed _nomo-theology_ or _typo-theology_. Under the same general category may be placed the argument from animal instinct, which is distinct at once from the evidence of design and that of law or typical order. To take one instance: The bee forms its cells, following unconsciously, and by what we term 'instinct,' the most intricate, mathematical, laws. There is mind, there is thought in the process; but whose mind, whose thought? Not the animal's, because it is not guided by experience. The result arrived at is a result which could be attained by man only through the exercise of reason of the very highest order. And the question arises, are we not warranted in supposing that a hidden pilot guides the bee, concealed behind what we call its instinct. We do not, meanwhile, discuss the merit of this argument; but merely indicate the difference between it and the argument from design, and that from law and order. It is not a question of the adjustment of phenomena. It is the demand of the intellect for a cause adequate to account for a unique phenomenon. It approaches the cosmo-theological argument as closely as it approaches the techno-theological one; yet it is different from both. The cosmo-theological rises from any particular effect, and by a backward mental bound reaches an infinite first cause. The techno-theological attempts to rise from the adjustment of means to ends, to an adjuster or contriver. This simply asks, whence comes the mind that is here in operation, perceived by its effects?

The next class of arguments are based upon the moral nature of man. They may be termed in general _ethico-theological_; and there are, at least, two main branches in this line of proof. The former is the argument from conscience as a moral law, pointing to Another above it; the law that is 'in us, yet not of us'--not the 'autonomy' of Kant, but a _theonomy_--bearing witness to a legislator above. It is the moral echo within the soul of a Voice louder and vaster without. And, as evidence, it is direct and intuitive, not inferential. The latter is the argument of Kant, (in which he was anticipated by several, notably by Raimund of Sabunde.) It is indirect and inferential, based upon the present phenomena of our moral nature. The moral law declares that evil is punishable and to be punished, that virtue is rewardable and to be rewarded; but in this life they are not so: therefore, said Kant, there must be a futurity in which the rectification will take place, and a moral arbiter by whom it will be effected.