and the god Nero?  Surely a people who could raise altars and offer sacrifices to such unmitigated monsters must have lost the very conception of religion.  Not only virtue, but the very belief in any source of virtue, must have been utterly extirpated in them.  When Herod spoke, the people said it was the voice of God; and he was smitten with worms because he gave not God the glory.  And surely the superhuman wickedness of the Caesars may be regarded as a punishment, equally significant, of the fearful blasphemy of the worshipped and the worshippers.

No wonder that the shores of Baiae now present a picture of the saddest desolation.  Where man sins, there man suffers.  The relation between human crime and the barren wilderness is still as inflexibly maintained as at the first.  Until all recollection of the iniquities of the place has passed away it is fitting that these silent shores should remain the desert that they are.  We should not wish the old voluptuous magnificence revived; and these myrtle bowers can never more regain the charm of virgin solitudes untainted by man.  Italy, like Palestine, has thus an accursed spot in its fairest region—­a visible monument to all ages, of the great truth that the tidal wave of retribution will inevitably overwhelm every nation that forgets the eternal distinctions of right and wrong.

St. Paul was a man of keen sensibilities and strong imagination.  He must therefore at Puteoli have been deeply impressed at once with the loveliness of nature and the wickedness of man.  The contrast would present itself to him in a very painful manner.  As at Athens—­where his spirit was moved within him when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry—­so here he must have had that noble indignation against the iniquities of the place—­the outrages committed on the laws of God, and the dishonour done to the nature of man made in the Divine image—­to which David and Jeremiah, and all the loftiest spirits of mankind, have given such stern and yet patriotic utterance.  What others were callous to, filled him with keen shame and sorrow.  He who could have wished that himself were accursed from Christ for his brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, must have had a profound pity for these wretched victims of profligacy, who were looking in their ignorance for salvation to a brutal mortal worse than themselves,—­“the son of perdition, sitting in the temple of God, showing that he was God.”  And to this feeling of indignation and sorrow, because of the wickedness of the place, must have been added a feeling of personal despondency.  From the significant circumstance that the apostle thanked God, and took courage, when he met the Christian brethren at Apii Forum, we may infer that he had previously great heaviness of spirit.  He would be more or less than human, if on setting his foot for the first time on the native soil of the conquerors of his country, and the lords of the whole world, and seeing on every side, even at this distance