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pagan civilizations in civic and patriotic virtues, in the love of liberty, in the number and splendour of the great characters they formed. They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice, and war; and they should probably be placed, in all intellectual virtues, lower than any other period in the history of mankind. A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud that could favour received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only effectually broken by the scrutinizing, innovating, and free thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men, who are not either priests or monks*, would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics in the age of Augustus or in the age of the Antonines, rather than in any period that elapsed between the triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century. The time came when the Christian priests shed blood enough. Indeed, the more carefully the Christian legislation of the empire is examined and the more fully it is compared with what had been done under the influence of Stoicism by the pagan legislators, the more evident, I think, it will appear that the golden age of Roman law was not Christian, but pagan, great works of codification were accomplished under the younger Theodosius and under Justinian, but it was in the reign of the pagan emperors, and especially of Hadrian and Alexander Severus, that nearly all the most important measures were taken: redressing injustice, elevating oppressed classes, and making the doctrine of the natural equality and fraternity of mankind the basis of legal enactments. Receiving; the heritage of these laws, the Christians no doubt added something; but a careful examination will show that it was surprisingly little. In no respect is the greatness of the Stoic philosophers more conspicuous than in contrast between the gigantic steps of legal reform made in a few years under their influence, and the almost insignificant steps taken when Christianity had obtained an
