of our own day. It is the duty of the State to provide for the education of every child under its control. It is also the duty of the State to grant to its adult population the utmost liberty to think what it pleases, and to utter what it thinks. Of course in speaking thus generally, I do not intend to condemn measures necessary for safety. Ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat' is a maxim which all states must observe. The President and Congress of the United States of America observe it no less than the Emperor and Senate of Russia. To Christianity for their religion, to liberty for their political institutions, the nations of the world must look, abjuring Superstition, Persecution, Intolerance in their religion; Injustice, Inequality, Despotism in their political institutions. HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I. PRELIMINARY ESSAY. STATE OF ROME UNDER AUGUSTUS. Ar the period when Christ came into the world, the human race, which was almost comprehended in the Roman Empire, was afflicted, after a series of fierce and pitiless wars, by the loss of liberty and the degeneracy of morals. Augustus, by the victory of Actium, had put an end to the rivalry by which, since the first triumvirate, the world had been given up to slaughter, proscription, and division. The great poet Lucretius had put up his prayer for peace :— Funde potens placidam Romanis inclyte pacem. Virgil and Horace, the adroit flatterers of Augustus, had endeavoured to instil the belief that, along with the cessation of civil war, there would arise an age not only of civil tranquillity, but of domestic purity. It was the fiction of these two sweet singers, that Augustus was about to open an age of felicity upon earth, founded upon the strength of the Roman arms and the restoration of the ancient Roman manners. Virgil, with some modesty, confines this era of domestic happiness to the rural population :— Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati: Casta pudicitiam servat domus. Horace, with a bolder flight of imagination, adorns in Venetian colours the happiness of the Roman Empire under his generous patron : Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat: Nutrit culta Ceres, almaque Faustitas: Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris; Culpam pœna premit comes. Quis Parthum paveat? Quis gelidum Scythen? Fœtus, incolumi Cæsare? Quis feræ Bellum curet Iberiæ ? In this and twenty other passages, Horace endeavours to infuse the belief that purity of domestic life, with security from foreign foes and civil discord, were to be the happy inheritance of the subjects of Augustus Cæsar. Yet he himself has given us a picture as disgusting as any that Juvenal or Tacitus has drawn of the connubial fidelity of the Roman wives : Fœcunda culpæ sæcula nuptias Primum inquinavere, et genus, et domos: In patriam populumque fluxit. Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos De tenero meditatur ungui. |