thought as they pleased.  Intellectual independence was not one of the characteristics of the Roman citizen.  He professed to think as the State prescribed, for the masters of the world were the slaves of the State in religion as in war.  The Romans were more gross in their vices as they were more pharisaical in their profession than the Greeks, whom they conquered and imitated.  Neither the sincere worship of ancestors, nor the ceremonies and rites which they observed in honor of their innumerable divinities, softened the severity of their character, or weakened their passion for war and bloody sports.  Their hard and rigid wills were rarely moved by the cries of agony or the shrieks of despair.  Their slavery was more cruel than among any nation of antiquity.  Butchery and legalized murder were the delight of Romans in their conquering days, as were inhuman sports in the days of their political decline.  Where was the spirit of religion, as it was even in India and Egypt, when women were debased; when every man and woman held a human being in cruel bondage; when home was abandoned for the circus and the amphitheatre; when the cry of the mourner was unheard in shouts of victory; when women sold themselves as wives to those who would pay the highest price, and men abstained from marriage unless they could fatten on rich dowries; when utility was the spring of every action, and demoralizing pleasure was the universal pursuit; when feastings and banquets were riotous and expensive, and violence and rapine were restrained only by the strong arm of law dictated by instincts of self-preservation?  Where was the ennobling influence of the gods, when nobody of any position finally believed in them?  How powerless the gods, when the general depravity was so glaring as to call out the terrible invective of Paul, the cosmopolitan traveller, the shrewd observer, the pure-hearted Christian missionary, indicting not a few, but a whole people:  “Who exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, ... being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affections, unmerciful.”  An awful picture, but sustained by the evidence of the Roman writers of that day as certainly no worse than the hideous reality.

If this was the outcome of the most exquisitely poetical and art-inspiring mythology the world has ever known, what wonder that the pure spirituality of Jesus the Christ, shining into that blackness of darkness, should have been hailed by perishing millions as the “light of the world”!

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AUTHORITIES.