ience, as in the latter nations,--a most significant and impressive
commentary on the uniform destinies of nations, when those virtues on
which the strength of man is based have passed away. An observer in the
days of Theodosius would very likely have seen the churches of Rome as
fully attended as are those in New York itself to-day; and he would have
seen a more magnificent city,--and yet it fell. There is no cure for a
corrupt and rotten civilization. As the farms of the old Puritans of
Massachusetts and Connecticut are gradually but surely passing into the
hands of the Irish, because the sons and grandsons of the old
New-England farmer prefer the uncertainties and excitements of a
demoralized city-life to laborious and honest work, so the possessions
of the Romans passed into the hands of German barbarians, who were
strong and healthy and religious. They desolated, but they
reconstructed.

The punishment of the enervated and sensual Roman was by war. We in
America do not fear this calamity, and have no present cause of fear,
because we have not sunk to the weakness and wickedness of the Romans,
and because we have no powerful external enemies. But if amid our
magnificent triumphs of science and art, we should accept the
Epicureanism of the ancients and fall into their ways of life, then
there would be the same decline which marked them,--I mean in virtue and
public morality,--and there would be the same penalty; not perhaps
destruction from external enemies, as in Persia, Syria, Greece, and
Rome, but some grievous and unexpected series of catastrophes which
would be as mournful, as humiliating, as ruinous, as were the incursions
of the Germanic races. The operations of law, natural and moral, are
uniform. No individual and no nation can escape its penalty. The world
will not be destroyed; Christianity will not prove a failure,--but new
forces will arise over the old, and prevail. Great changes will come. He
whose right it is to rule will overturn and overturn: but "creation
shall succeed destruction; melodious birth-songs will come from the
fires of the burning phoenix," assuring us that the progress of the race
is certain, even if nations are doomed to a decline and fall whenever
conservative forces are not strong enough to resist the torrent of
selfishness, vanity, and sin.

AUTHORITIES.

The original authorities are Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus, Sozomen,
Socrates, orations of Gregory Nazianzen, Theodoret, the