It is mournful to think that a brilliant external civilization was so feeble to arrest both decay and ruin.  It is sad to think that neither art nor literature nor law had conservative strength; that the manners and habits of the people grew worse and worse, as is universally admitted, amid all the glories and triumphs and boastings of the proudest works of man.  “A world as fair and as glorious as our own,” says Sismondi, “was permitted to perish.”  Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, met the old fate of Babylon, of Tyre, of Carthage.  Degeneracy was as marked and rapid in the former, notwithstanding all the civilizing influences of letters, jurisprudence, arts, and utilitarian science, as in the latter nations,—­a most significant and impressive commentary on the uniform destinies of nations, when those virtues on which the strength of man is based have passed away.  An observer in the days of Theodosius would very likely have seen the churches of Rome as fully attended as are those in New York itself to-day; and he would have seen a more magnificent city,—­and yet it fell.  There is no cure for a corrupt and rotten civilization.  As the farms of the old Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut are gradually but surely passing into the hands of the Irish, because the sons and grandsons of the old New-England farmer prefer the uncertainties and excitements of a demoralized city-life to laborious and honest work, so the possessions of the Romans passed into the hands of German barbarians, who were strong and healthy and religious.  They desolated, but they reconstructed.

The punishment of the enervated and sensual Roman was by war.  We in America do not fear this calamity, and have no present cause of fear, because we have not sunk to the weakness and wickedness of the Romans, and because we have no powerful external enemies.  But if amid our magnificent triumphs of science and art, we should accept the Epicureanism of the ancients and fall into their ways of life, then there would be the same decline which marked them,—­I mean in virtue and public morality,—­and there would be the same penalty; not perhaps destruction from external enemies, as in Persia, Syria, Greece, and Rome, but some grievous and unexpected series of catastrophes which would be as mournful, as humiliating, as ruinous, as were the incursions of the Germanic races.  The operations of law, natural and moral, are uniform.  No individual and no nation can escape its penalty.  The world will not be destroyed; Christianity will not prove a failure,—­but new forces will arise over the old, and prevail.  Great changes will come.  He whose right it is to rule will overturn and overturn:  but “creation shall succeed destruction; melodious birth-songs will come from the fires of the burning phoenix,” assuring us that the progress of the race is certain, even if nations are doomed to a decline and fall whenever conservative forces are not strong enough to resist the torrent of selfishness, vanity, and sin.