The darkness is deepest just before the dawn, and never did a grosser darkness or a thicker mist of moral pestilence brood over the surface of Pagan society than at the period when the Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in His wings.  There have been many ages when the dense gloom of a heartless immorality seemed to settle down with unusual weight; there have been many places where, under the gaslight of an artificial system, vice has seemed to acquire an unusual audacity; but never probably was there any age or any place where the worst forms of wickedness were practiced with a more unblushing effrontery than in the city of Rome under the government of the Caesars.  A deeply-seated corruption seemed to have fastened upon the very vitals of the national existence.  It is surely a lesson of deep moral significance that just as they became most polished in their luxury they became most vile in their manner of life.  Horace had already bewailed that “the age of our fathers, worse than that of our grandsires, has produced us who are yet baser, and who are doomed to give birth to a still more degraded offspring.”  But fifty years later it seemed to Juvenal that in his times the very final goal of iniquity had been attained, and he exclaims, in a burst of despair, that “posterity will add nothing to our immorality; our descendents can but do and desire the same crimes as ourselves.”  He who would see but for a moment and afar off to what the Gentile world had sunk, at the very period when Christianity began to spread, may form some faint and shuddering conception from the picture of it drawn in the Epistle to the Romans.

We ought to realize this fact if we would judge of Seneca aright.  Let us then glance at the condition of the society in the midst of which he lived.  Happily we can but glance at it.  The worst cannot be told.  Crimes may be spoken of; but things monstrous and inhuman should for ever be concealed.  We can but stand at the cavern’s mouth, and cast a single ray of light into its dark depths.  Were we to enter, our lamp would be quenched by the foul things which would cluster round it.

In the age of Augustus began that “long slow agony,” that melancholy process of a society gradually going to pieces under the dissolving influence of its own vices which lasted almost without interruption till nothing was left for Rome except the fire and sword of barbaric invasions.  She saw not only her glories but also her virtues “star by star expire.”  The old heroism, the old beliefs, the old manliness and simplicity, were dead and gone; they had been succeeded by prostration and superstition by luxury and lust.

     “There is the moral of all human tales,
     ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
     First freedom, and then glory; when that fails,
     Wealth, vice, corruption,—­barbarism at last: 
     And history, with all her volumes vast,
     Hath but one page; ’tis better written here
     Where gorgeous tyranny hath thus amassed
     All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear,
     Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask.”