commanded exclusively for Himself by the living and jealous Jehovah, was impiously prostituted to the honour of his dead creatures, while a superstitious veneration for their "graven images," the universal and infallible mark of pagan enmity to God, openly braved the thunders of Mount Horeb.

That no class of society could have been influenced by the pure and benignant spirit of the religion of peace, holiness, and charity, when the instruction and example administered by the most eminent of the clergy consisted in the fierce and frivolous contentions of a fantastic theology, in excitement of ferocious passion, and in the practices of an idolatrous ritual, is a truism so apparent that I advert to it only for the purpose of connecting the outlines to which the attention of my reader is at present requested.

The imperial crown was the frequent prize of the blackest perfidy and most atrocious murder. Unlimited power over all the resources of a mighty empire, acquired by the perpetration of every crime, was valued only as affording the amplest means for the indulgence, with a publicity that spurned every semblance of decency, the foulest passions in their most hideous depravity. An established portion of the imperial household consisted of a numerous body of barbarously mutilated human beings.* The sceptre

* Since the subversion of the Greek empire no vestige of such an establishment has disgraced the palace of any christian monarch, except that of the Pope, where, in the choir of the Vatican chapel, it continues to adorn the devotions of his holiness!

perpetually streamed with the blood of its most meritorious subjects, as if its only duty to God or man was to extirpate from human nature every quality that could redeem it from total corruption.

The condition of private life was no better. It was stained, in full proportion to its capabilities, with every turpitude of which the throne only exhibited, from a more elevated theatre, a more flagrant example.

The Bishop Liutprand, in the eighth century, thus describes the Roman character-" in this name we include whatever is base, whatever is cowardly, whatever is perfidious, the extremes of avarice and luxury, and every vice that can prostitute the dignity of human nature." (Gibbon, ch. 49.) The testimony of the Lombard is concurrent with that of Ammianus Marcellinus, whose representation of Roman manners, as cited by Gibbon in the thirty-first chapter of his history, may be referred to for proof that, so late as the beginning of the fifth century, the establishment of christianity had not effected any sensible reformation of those morals of which the infamy stands immortalized by the poets and historians of pagan Rome. The vilest and most odious vices were unblushingly, because generally and habitually, practised. The violation of all the most sacred of the social and domestic duties was almost universal. The base voluptuousness of an opulent and utterly degraded aristocracy was still pampered by the labours of a multitude of wretches, bound in all the horrors of hereditary and domestic slavery to tyrants, whose callous hearts were steeled against every feeling of mercy,

trained as they were from early youth by the public institutions of their country, to consider spectacles of pain and slaughter among their most pleasurable

amusements.

Every principle of religion and every sentiment of humanity continued to be insulted and outraged by the exhibitions of gladiatorial combats, wherein multitudes of human beings were annually compelled, by threats of excruciating torments, to devote themselves to public and mutual butchery, for the pastime of all ranks of a people brutalized to the enjoyment of a spectacle composed of bleeding wounds, mutilated limbs, and the groans of human life expiring in

* In the eastern division of the Roman dominions gladiatorial butchery, an exotic introduced by the arms of the west, and never perfectly acclimated, quickly faded and died away under the prohibition of Constantine: but in the Latin empire the native vigour of an indigenous institution flourished through his entire reign, and long survived it. “The first christian emperor may claim

the honour of the first edict which condemned the art and amusement of shedding human blood; but this benevolent law expressed the wishes of the prince, without reforming an inveterate abuse, which degraded a civilized nation below the condition of savage cannibals. Several hundred, perhaps several thousand, victims were annually slaughtered in the great cities of the empire; and the month of December, more particularly devoted to the combats of gladiators, still exhibited to the eyes of the Roman people a grateful spectacle of blood and cruelty.” (Gibbon, ch. 30.) The same eminent historian undeservedly accredits the Latin emperor Honorius with the total abolition, in the fifth century, of the horrible barbarism. That monarch's prohibitory command was obeyed only in the city of Rome. Fear of the Goths, elate with recent triumphs over the Roman arms, and

The vindication of divine justice, in the moral government of the world, required a signal visitation of divine wrath on a people, who thus scorned or abused the light which, persecuted or protected, had been for four centuries shining among them. They were ordained by Providence to prepare, within their own territories, and by their own folly and barbarity, the appointed instruments of their exemplary punishment.

The conquests of Zengis and of Tamerlane were only modern repetitions of the ravages with which, from times of the remotest antiquity, wide regions of the earth had been wasted by the savage myriads of Scythia. Vast hordes of them, known by the name of Huns, had moved successively in a north-western

already looking with impatience on his dominions as their destined prey, confined the feeble Honorius to the fortress of Ravenna, whence he promulgated a repetition of Constantine's humane mandate. A decrepid government, even when languishing into extinction, may retain about its ancient seat some lingering remnant of precarious power, after every symptom of its vitality has abandoned the extremities of its territory. To the utterly debased population of the vast metropolis, the ordained suppression of their favourite festivity appeared only as one of the incessant freaks of a despotism, whose tyrannous insolence had long ceased to awaken their abject servility to any emotion inconsistent with the habit of unlimited obedience; and they accordingly yielded to the odious edict a sullen submission, ungraced by any concurring sentiment of humanity. But throughout the numerous provincial cities of the empire the "benevolent law" was not more efficient than when it first "expressed the wishes" of its illustrious author; and the "inveterate abuse" prolonged its hideous outrages on religion and human nature until the year 500, when it was finally extirpated by the sword of Theodoric, the Ostrogothic conqueror and king of Italy.

direction from the confines of China, until rounding the northern shores of the Caspian sea, in the fourth century of the Christian era, their countless multitudes poured down in a succession of overwhelming torrents on the great Scandinavian, or Gothic, nation, of which the several tribes, each under its own king, extended the authority of one supreme ruler over all the north of Europe from the Baltic to the Euxine. In the year 376 a large body of Visi-goths, after a brave but ineffectual resistance, fled, with their wives and children, from the cruelty of their ferocious invaders, until their flight was arrested by the Danube, of which the passage was vigilantly guarded by the garrisons of the Roman fortresses stationed along both its banks. In this extremity of their wretchedness they implored, as fellow-christians, the protection of the Emperor Valens, and, for an asylum in any part of his dominions, vowed, for themselves and their posterity, the devotion of a grateful allegiance to him and his successors. A reasonable apprehension, that refusal might convert the humble supplications of an armed multitude into the formidable fury of their resentment and despair, suggested to the fears of the cruel and feeble Valens a compliance, which would have been vainly entreated from his generosity or compassion. They were not only allowed to cross the river, but, in obedience to the orders of Valens, the Roman garrisons, with all the means of transport they could collect, were occupied many days and nights in conveying them over the deep and rapid current, above a mile in breadth.