years of the Christian era, the dominion of the Caesars was the most efficient earthly instrument for the extension of the faith. The persecution which the followers of the new faith occasionally suffered, were the results of aberrations from the general principles of tolerance, which characterized the religious policy of the empire; and after a few such acts of insane cruelty, the natural course of reaction brought the persecuted religion into fast increasing and finally universal favor.
If the religion, thus widely and lastingly diffused, was corrupted from the simplicity of the truth as it was in Jesus, this corruption is to be charged, not against the Romans, but against the unworthy successors of the apostles and ancient fathers, who sought to make the severe beauty of the naked truth more acceptable to the heathenish fancies of the people, by robing it in the borrowed finery of mythology. Yet, though thus humiliated in its triumph, the victory of Christianity over that complex and dazzling religion, was most complete. The faith to which Italians and Greeks had been devoted for ages,—which had drawn its first and noblest principles from the mysterious sources of the antique Etruscan, Egyptian and Phoenician, and had enriched its dark and boundless plan with all that the varied superstitions of every conquered people could furnish,—the faith which had rooted itself so deeply in the poetry, the patriotism, and the language of the Roman, and had so twined itself with every scene of his nation's glory, from the days of Romulus,—now gave way before the simple word of the carpenter of Nazareth, and was so torn up and swept away from its strong holds, that the very places which through twenty generations its triumphs had hallowed, were now turned into shrines for the worship of the God of despised Judah. So utterly was the Olympian Jove unseated, and cast down from his long-dreaded throne, that his name passed away forever from the worship of mankind, and has never been recalled, but with contempt. He, and all his motley train of gods and goddesses, are remembered no more with reverence, but vanishing from even the knowledge of the mass of the people, are
"Gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were,"—
"A school-boy's tale."
Every ancient device for the perpetuation of the long established faith, disappeared in the advancing light of the gospel. Temples, statues, oracles, festivals, and all the solemn paraphernalia of superstition, were swept to oblivion, or, changing their names
