In the earlier civilization, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted.  Exquisite as was their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral excellence in some of its manifestations, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality.  With a few rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not supposed to be incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greeks.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality.  A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only once on this planet.  There was never a people before, and there has been none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it.  But the Roman morality is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself.  It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself.  The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the old spirit endured.  But as soon as the energy grew slack, when the religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in, and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet, all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Censors presents, in its later age, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal desire, with means unlimited to gratify it.  In Latin literature, as little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.  Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to reason.  But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life, which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality; it involves no sense of sin.  If sin could be indulged without weakening our self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have nothing to say against it.