or his zealous efforts in behalf of orthodoxy. An eminent
scholar of the advanced school has seen nothing in him to admire, and
much to blame. But he was undoubtedly a very great man, and rendered
important services to his age and to civilization, although he could not
arrest the fatal disease which even then had destroyed the vitality of
the Empire. It was already doomed when he ascended the throne. No mortal
genius, no imperial power, could have saved the crumbling Empire.

In my lecture on Marcus Aurelius I alluded to the external prosperity
and internal weakness of the old Roman world during his reign. That
outward prosperity continued for a century after he was dead,--that is,
there were peace, thrift, art, wealth, and splendor. Men were unmolested
in the pursuit of pleasure. There were no great wars with enemies beyond
the limits of the Empire. There were wars of course; but these chiefly
were civil wars between rival aspirants for imperial power, or to
suppress rebellions, which did not alarm the people. They still sat
under their own vines and fig-trees, and danced to voluptuous music, and
rejoiced in the glory of their palaces. They feasted and married and
were given in marriage, like the antediluvians. They never dreamed that
a great catastrophe was near, that great calamities were impending.

I do not say that the people in that century were happy or contented, or
even generally prosperous. How could they be happy or prosperous when
monsters and tyrants sat on the throne of Augustus and Trajan? How could
they be contented when there was such a vast inequality of
condition,--when slaves were more numerous than freemen,--when most of
the women were guarded and oppressed,--when scarcely a man felt secure
of the virtue of his wife, or a wife of the fidelity of her
husband,--when there was no relief from corroding sorrows but in the
sports of the amphitheatre and circus, or some form of demoralizing
excitement or public spectacle,--when the great mass were ground down by
poverty and insult, and the few who were rich and favored were satiated
with pleasure, ennued, and broken down by dissipation,--when there was
no hope in this world or in the next, no true consolation in sickness or
in misfortune, except among the Christians, who fled by thousands to
desert places to escape the contaminating vices of society?

But if the people were not happy or fortunate as a general thing, they
anticipated no overwhelming calam