only, were made the instruments of recommending the new faith to the eyes of the common people. But, however the pliant spirit of the degenerate successors of the early fathers might bend to the vulgar superstitions of the day, the establishment of the Christian religion, upon the ruins of Roman heathenism, was effected with a completeness that left not a name to live behind them, nor the vestige of a form, to keep alive in the minds of the people, the memory of the ancient religion. The words applied by our great poet to the time of Christ's birth, have something more than poetical force, as a description of the absolute extermination of these superstitions, both public and domestic, on the final triumph of Christianity:
"The oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Rolls through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."
"In consecrated earth
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns and altars round,
A drear and dying sound,
Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat."
Thus were the mighty labors of human ambition made subservient to the still greater achievements of divine benevolence; thus did the unholy triumphs of the hosts of heathenism become, in the hands of the All-wise, the surest means of spreading the holy and peace-making truths of Christianity, to the ends of the earth,—otherwise unapproachable without a miracle. The dominion which thus grew upon and over the vast empire of Rome, though growing with her growth and strengthening with her strength, sunk not with her weakness, but, stretching abroad fresh branches, whose leaves were for the healing of nations then unknown, showed its divine origin by its immortality; while, alas! its human modifications betrayed themselves in its diminished grace and ill-preserved symmetry. Yet in spite of these, rather than by means of them, it rose still mightier above the ruins of the empire, under whose shadow it had grown, till, at last, supplanting Roman and Goth alike, it fixed its roots on the seven hills of the Eternal city; where, thenceforth, for hundreds
