No wonder the ancient world had assured itself that, as nothing greater, nothing wiser, nothing more glorious than Rome could ever arise upon earth, so its greatness, wisdom, and glory could never be superseded. It was "the eternal city." It was "for ever to give laws to the world." The contemporary poets could imagine no stronger expression of an eternity, than that of a duration while Rome itself should last. Yet was it at that very time that the eyes of a fisherman of the lake of Tiberias were opened to see the angel "coming down from heaven with power and great glory," from whose mighty cry over the fall of Babylon we have already quoted some words. No wonder when the time came that his prophecy was fulfilled, the world stood by weeping and mourning, not over the fall of a single city (such as Scipio Africanus had forecast as he watched the smoke of old Carthage rising up to heaven), but over the ruin of the civilization of the whole world. No wonder that, even in our own age, those whose hearts have so far sunk back to the level of heathenism as to value only material prosperity and worldly greatness, still re-echo the cry—
"Alas! the eternal city, and alas!
The trebly hundred triumphs, and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The conqueror's sword in bearing fame away.
Alas! for earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she wore when
Rome was free."
But the voice of divine wisdom was far different: "Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath judged your judgment upon her. And a mighty angel took up a stone, as it were a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, 'With such violence as this shall Babylon, that great city, be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all; and the voice of harpers, and of musicians, and of them that play on the pipe and on the trumpet, shall no more be heard at all in thee; and no craftsman, of any art whatsoever, shall be found any more at all in thee; and the sound of the mill shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of the lamp shall shine no more in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee; for thy merchants were the great men of the earth, for all nations have been deceived by thine enchantments.' And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth."
Thus total, according to the prophecy, was to be the destruction of the wealth, civilization, greatness, and glory of the ancient heathen world, gathered together in Rome, that in the utter sweeping away of that one city all might perish together. How fully the words were accomplished we know by the lamentation of the whole world over Babylon, the echoes of which still ring in our ears. But to us Christians it rather belongs to weigh the words which follow without any break in the sacred text (although the division of the chapters leads many readers to overlook the close connection). "After these things I heard, as it were, the voice of much people in heaven, saying, 'Alleluia. Salvation, and glory, and power is to our God. For just and true are his judgments, who hath judged the great harlot which corrupted the earth with her fornications, and he hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hands.' And again they said, 'Alleluia. And her smoke ascendeth for ever and ever.'" Here is the answer to that cry of the angel, "Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye apostles and prophets."
Were any comment needed upon such prophecies—any explanation of the sentence passed upon a civilization so great, so ancient, so widely extended, and so refined—anything to reconcile us to the utter destruction of so much that was fair and mighty, we may find it in the latter half of the lecture before us. Not that our author is insensible to the marvellous beauty of that glow with which classical literature causes the figures of those days to shine before us. That would be impossible for a man of his studies. He says:
"Is not the very language of Cicero and Virgil an expression of this lordly, yet peaceful rule; this even, undisturbed majesty, which holds the world together like the regularity of the seasons, like the alternations of light and darkness, like the all-pervading warmth of the sun? If every language reflects the character of the race which speaks it, surely we discern in the very strain of Virgil the closing of the gates of war, the settling of the nations down to the arts of peace, the reign of law and order, the amity and concord of races, the weak protected, the strong ruled: in a word,
'Romanos rerum dominos,
gentemque togatam.'"
Neither, need it hardly be said, has he set the hideous pollutions of that civilization fully before us: that is rendered impossible by its very hideousness. Let those who recoil from the horrors of what he has said—but a faint outline of the miserable truth, though traced with singular artistic form and beauty—bear in mind the while the words of the inspired prophecy, "All nations have drunk of the wine of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her"—"Her sins have reached unto heaven, and the Lord shall reward her iniquities"—"In her was found the blood of prophets, and saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth." The crimes, as well as the civilization of a thousand years, were accumulated at Rome, and both were swept away together by that overwhelming flood of fierce barbarians. Little were it worthy of Christians to mourn over a civilization into whose very heart-strings such unutterable pollution was intertwined; especially as it was removed, not like Babylon of old, to leave behind it nothing but desolation, but to make room for that kingdom of God which was to be enthroned upon its ruins; for such was the purpose of God, that the very centre of Christendom, the very seat of the throne of Christ upon earth, on which he would visibly sit in the person of his Vicar, was there to be established, whence the throne of the Caesars and the golden house of Nero had been swept away in headlong ruin. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth was gone. And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, 'Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people, and God himself shall be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'" "And he that sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I make all things new.'" The full accomplishment of these words we expect, in faith and hope, when "death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more; for the former things are passed away;" yet, surely, whatever more glorious accomplishment is yet to come, it were blindness not to see how far they are already fulfilled in the substitution of Christendom for the civilized pagan world, the setting up the throne of the Vicar of Christ upon the ruins of the palace of the Caesars.
First among the causes of that hideous accumulated mixture of blood and filth in which heathen civilization was drowned, Mr. Allies most justly places the institution of slavery as it was at Rome, because by this the springs of human life were tainted. It is certain that during all the long years of the duration of the Roman [{372}] empire, there was among its heathen population no one human being, who lived beyond the earliest childhood, who was not polluted, and whose very soul was not scarred and branded, by the marks of that hideous moral pestilence. We say "its heathen population," because great as must have been the evil it wrought upon ordinary Christians, we doubt not that there were those who gathered honey out of corruption, and whose justice, charity, and purity came out from that furnace of temptation with a brightness which nothing but the most fiery trial could have given to them. From slavery the whole of Roman society received its form. Our author most truly says, "The spirit of slavery is never limited to the slave; it saturates the atmosphere which the freeman breathes together with the slave; passes into his nature, and corrupts it." This miserable truth can never be too often impressed upon men, because, unhappily, there are still advocates of slavery who think that they apologize for it if they can prove, as they think, that the slave is happy. As well might they argue that the introduction of the plague into London would be no calamity, if the man who brought it in upon him entered the city dancing and shouting. In ancient Italy slaves replaced the hardy rustics, that "prisca gens mortalium" who, though doubtless far less virtuous than they appeared in the fevered dreams of men sick of the vices of Rome in the last days of the republic, were still among the best specimens of heathen life. Wherever slavery extends, labor becomes dishonorable as the badge of servitude, a few masters languish in bloated luxury, but the nation itself grows constantly poorer, as an ever-increasing proportion of its population has to be maintained in indolence. At Rome slaves were the only domestic servants, and after a time the only manufacturers. And yet even this is nothing compared to the evils of a state of society in which the great majority of women as well as of men are the absolute property of their masters. Horrible as was this state of things, it offered so many gratifications to the corrupt natures of those whose hands held the power of the world, and without whose consent it could not be abolished, that it would have seemed to any one who had ever witnessed the life of a wealthy Roman noble no less than madness to imagine that any man would ever willingly surrender them.