h crested and encircled the hill, did he not know full well
that iniquity was written on its very walls, and spoke a solemn warning to
a Christian heart to go out of it, to flee it, not to take up a home in
it, not to make alliance with anything in it? Did he not know from
experience full well that, when he got into it, his glance could no longer
be unrestrained, or his air free; but that it would be necessary for him
to keep a control upon his senses, and painfully guard himself against
what must either be a terror to him and an abhorrence, or a temptation?
Enter in imagination into a town like Sicca, and you will understand the
great Apostle's anguish at seeing a noble and beautiful city given up to
idolatry. Enter it, and you will understand why it was that the poor
priest, of whom Jucundus spoke so bitterly, hung his head, and walked with
timid eyes and clouded brow through the joyous streets of Carthage.
Hitherto we have only been conducting heathens through it, boys or men,
Jucundus, Arnobius, and Firmian; but now a Christian enters it with a
Christian's heart and a Christian's hope.

Well is it for us, dear reader, that we in this age do not experience--nay,
a blessed thing that we cannot even frame to ourselves in imagination--the
actual details of evil which hung as an atmosphere over the cities of
Pagan Rome. An Apostle calls the tongue "a fire, a world of iniquity,
untameable, a restless evil, a deadly poison;" and surely what he says
applies to hideous thoughts represented to the eye, as well as when they
are made to strike upon the ear. Unfortunate Agellius! what takes you into
the city this morning? Doubtless some urgent, compulsive duty; otherwise
you would not surely be threading its lanes or taking the circuit of its
porticoes, amid sights which now shock and now allure; fearful sights--not
here and there, but on the stateliest structures and in the meanest
hovels, in public offices and private houses, in central spots and at the
corners of the streets, in bazaars and shops and house-doors, in the
rudest workmanship and in the highest art, in letters or in emblems or in
paintings--the insignia and the pomp of Satan and of Belial, of a reign of
corruption and a revel of idolatry which you can neither endure nor
escape. Wherever you go it is all the same; in the police-court on the
right, in the military station on the left, in the crowd around the
temple, in the procession with its victims and its worshipp