successfully laying the foundation of a state, which was destined to occupy the first rank among the nations of the earth. Then we have seen this ambitious people take the position of an exclusive and haughty aristocracy, exercising oppression over a much larger community, their equals in blood, but by the mischance of war thrown into the relation of a politically proscribed and dependent order. We have hastily noticed some of the events of the struggle, to which this unnatural relation of parties inevitably gave rise. We have seen the inferior and oppressed party engage in the at first unequal but in the end successful contest for simple protection against cruel legislation; then rise in their demands, claiming and in the end obtaining an acknowledged importance in the affairs of the government; then strive after and in spite of much cunning and bitter opposition obtain one after another the highest political and priestly offices; and finally complete their full equality with the hitherto privileged order in the sphere of legislative power and importance. The period to which our review of these events has at length brought us, is the happiest and internally the most prosperous in Roman history. But with this period may properly be dated a new and less gratifying direction in the expansion of the Roman mind. Henceforth the energy of united Rome is chiefly expended, and with cumulative power, in the pathway of conquest and dominion. With that deadness of human feeling consequent upon a state of constant war, and that unprecedented accumulation of public and private wealth, resulting from the plunder of repeated victories, the tone of true patriotic sentiment is daily lowered, the manners and habits of the people fast degenerate, new and vicious forms of distinction in rank are created, the noble dignity of the Roman character is compromised, and a deep and contagious corruption, flowing from the heart through all the dependencies of the commonwealth, is made to foster that terrible compound of sycophancy, buffoonery and blood-thirstiness, which, in the persons of the rulers not less than in those of more humble rank, ultimately characterized the expiring dominion of the universal empire. This melancholy sequel to that happy issue of the early Roman history, which it has been the purpose of this article to develope, should certainly modify any undue estimate of the prospects of human nature in its conflicts with oppression, which an exclusive view of the early Roman experience may be calculated to encourage. It is at the same time full of instruction, as attesting the conditions without which no measure of human prosperity can hope for perpetuity with any people. Thus viewed, it adds the sanction of history to the intuitions of morality and religion, that every attainment of a privilege is followed by a proportionate responsibility, every re-conquest of an inalienable right is attended by a corresponding increase in the number of high duties, and that constant vigilance, virtue and good faith, both public and private, are as indispensable to the maintenance of a high social and political greatness, as to the movements by which such greatness is to be achieved. But if the progress towards social and political equality, so characteristic of that portion of Roman history which has suggested our subject, be viewed, as such phases of human advancement always should be, with reference to the moral and religious conditions of its success, it becomes as encouraging to humanity as, in itself considered, it is certainly instructive. Viewed in such a light, it demonstrates, so far as the experience of one people can represent the capabilities and tendencies of mankind generally, that institutions based in wrong and supported by violence, must not only provoke the resistance of the oppressed people, but that an attempt to give permanence to such unnatural relations between man and man will inevitably be defeated of its object; that every advance towards a stage of human equality will in its turn become an agent in forwarding a still higher enfranchisement; that in the long issue of noble conflicts the tyranny of privilege and caste must give way to the rising genius of freedom and equity; and that, so long as the righteous struggle is guided by the wisdom of charity, combined with a resolute purpose, impelled by a constant and ever increasing faith in the efficacy of principle, and hallowed by a sacred regard for that pledged honor, the compromise of which no amount of received wrong can ever justify, the cause of humanity has nothing to fear, and every thing to hope, in its conflicts with the violence, tyranny and falsehood of the world. G. H. E. ART. XXV. Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity; or, the Race developed and educated by degrees. In the barbarous ages, each one was a law unto himself, and every man did what seemed right in his own eyes. Rude, without knowledge or religion, the intellect untrained, and the fiercest and foulest lusts and passions allowed to make their nest in the heart, and grow up there stronger and more ferocious every day, like a lion's whelps-it was to be expected that scenes of violence and blood should come of these at last. It could be set down as certain that wrong and mutual injury would spring up; that hatred and revenge, oppression and fierce retaliation, cruelty and murder, would stalk forth in every direction, making a demon-dance of life, and an actual flaming hell of this fair earth, which God has builded up for us to live on. To this and much more it actually came. Every gentle and loving thing was not, or hid itself in terror. and Goodness and Love went away sorrowful, finding no resting place for themselves; not standing-room even in this wild tumult of passion and wrong, this savage struggle of the human mob, this ever dominant rule of whatever of the animal and sensual there is in man. Virtue This was the iron age, when Might fought it out triumphantly against Right; when every one took the government into his own hands, redressed his own wrongs, real or imaginary; when Abel was in perpetual peril, and Cain had it all his own way, and slew his weaker brother when he would; when the blood-avenger pursued his victim with a tireless, wolfish ferocity, and there was no city of refuge; when, in short, man was only a higher sort of wild beast-higher only because of his superior cunning, and the greater intensity and tenacity of his hate, and the terribleness of his vengeance. After this came the Chief or the Master, the Lawgiver, and the Priest; and they, after a certain sort, brought these wild beasts into a human tameness, reduced these barbarians into some kind of order. Religion had much to do with this, and had a large part of the labor to perform. Even the ruler and the lawgiver cannot get on with their part of the work without help from it. It is well known that all the ancient legislators, the celebrated law-makers of the great nations of the early ages, set up claims to intercourse with the gods, and declared their codes as the dictation of the deities. Zoroaster was enlightened in a mount of fire, where his god reveals himself. Solon, even, must have his oracle to give dignity and authority to his laws. Lycurgus is not brave enough to legislate on his own authority, but must assert some divine sanction. Numa must have his Egeria, and Zaleucus his Minerva; and so on to the end. All feel the need of compelling respect and obedience by authority of the gods. The priests of religion diligently improved on this beginning, and added all manner of inventions and fables to illustrate the wrath and judgements of the gods on the disobedient in this life, and to set forth the fictitious torments and terrors that awaited them in the next. The king, the lawgiver, and the priest were as one in this matter; and the multitude, as superstitious as they were ignorant and savage, were afraid of the anger of the gods, of the flames of Tartarus, and stood in awe of those who represented the one, and could save them from, or devote them to, the other.1 1 As proof of this statement, take the testimony of some of the old writers. Livy, the Roman historian, praises Numa, because he invented the fear of the gods as a "a most efficacious means of governing the ignorant and barbarous populace." Hist. i. 19. Strabo, the geographer, says, "It is impossible to govern women (!?), and the gross multitude, or rabble, by the precepts of philosophy, and keep them virtuous, pious, and holy. We must also employ superstition, with its fables and prodigies. For the thunder, the torches, the serpents, the sceptres of the gods, are fables, as is all the ancient theology; but legislators introduced these things as terrors to those who are of childish understanding," (i. e. not instructed in philosophy.) Lib. i. Polybius, the great historian, makes this declaration: "Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by the fear and the terrors of the invisible world. On which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions." Lib. vi. 56. But all this while they loved injustice, revenge, and blood as much as if they had no faith in either gods or Tartarus. They sometimes conformed outwardly to the law of the ruler, to the ceremony of the priest, and abstained from open outrage and crime; not that they loved the sin any less, but that they feared hell more. Well, in such an age, and with such ferocious human brutes to deal with, and to be kept from tearing and devouring each other-this was something; to say the least, it was a gain on the unrestrained passions, and wild, lawless plunder and blood of the cast-iron era which preceded it. There was a kind of order in it, and a certain sort of security in the rule of the kingsman, and the influence of the priest,-not of the best kind, not of the highest class, I grant; but better than none, better than anarchy and the rule of the strongest. - It is a good, the best thing doubtless, if you can, to transform the tiger to a lamb. This is the safest kind of security against his ferocity. But if you cannot do this, by all means cage him, for your own sake and for that of your neighbors, or at least get him chained, speedily as may be, with a reasonably short chain. Perhaps in time, by a judicious treatment, you may make him quite gentle and tame; even trust him at last without a chain, and leave him to go his way without danger. But this tameness and absence of ferocity, be it noted, come, not of the cage or the chain, which only restrain, but of the judicious. and kindly treatment which accompanies it. If we turn from these heathen lawgivers and priests to Moses and the Jews, we have a new order of things, and discover another forward step in the progress of religious thought and principles of action. We have not only the negative element, but the positive also; not only what you shall not do, but likewise what you shall do. This in the moral and practical part; while in the dogmatic we rise up from the darkness and confusion of the thousand petty and often brutal and lustful gods of the pagan, into the sublime but simple truth of the One Eternal, Almighty Dr. Good, in his Book of Nature, remarks that "Egypt is said to have been the inventress of this important and valuable part of the common tradition." Harpers' Edit. p. 338. |