and
power; if any one brought up among flatterers and slaves has never had
a conception of liberty, frankness and truth; if any one has wholly
surrendered himself to pleasure, full tables, carousals, lewdness,
sorcery, and deceit, let him go to Rome." There was no Bible either
to preach against it or to interfere with it. These things were the
product then, as they are now, of infidelity. Whenever the world
wishes a civilization so barbarous as that, the reviler of the Bible
must create it, for they have the applause of evil and the good-will
of crime. In the age of Rome, when this skepticism was the creed of
the State, Nero got tired of the goddess Astarte, and murdered his own
brother, his wife, and his mother, and the senate was so affected with
the same opinion that they heard his justification and proceeded to
heap new honors upon him. He threw the preacher Paul into jail, but
there Paul wrought out the impulse of Europe. In the age when the
great Livy said that "neglect of gods" had come, Caligula let loose
his imperial frenzy, and every stream of blood that could be sent
toward the sea carried its red tide. In that age when, like later
eloquent critics, Ennius said that he did not believe that the gods
thought of human beings, "for if the gods concerned themselves about
the human race the good would prosper and the bad suffer," the
courtesan was kept for pleasure and the wife for domestic slavery. In
that happy age of unbelief, when Menander sung "the gods do not care
for men," "the homes were," according to Juvenal, "broken up before
the nuptial garland faded"; and according to Tertullian, "they married
only to be divorced." Friends exchanged wives; infanticide and other
hellish crimes were common. This is what that spirit, in its purity,
did for the home, when there was no Bible to read at its hearthstone
and no New Testament to put into the hands of young lovers departing
to make a new rooftree.

Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible. In that age,
when "God was dead"; in that age, when "the gods had abdicated";
they said, "the mechanic's occupation is degrading. A workshop is
incompatible with anything noble." The curse of slavery had blotted
the name of labor, and they agreed that "a purchased laborer is better
than a hired one," and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to
conceal the myriads of slaves. In that age Nero, who had the same
opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which