For, in truth, all this splendour and luxury was not merely associated, but inseparably one with a moral system, by far the most execrable, the most indescribable, the most inconceivable, under which God's earth ever groaned. The morals of the accursed race were far too foul to be described here. They became the wonder and loathing, the byword of contempt even of the heathen barbarians by whom they were surrounded.[5] Lust, not merely unbridled, but wearing out and jading itself to invent new ways of pollution; and cruelty, shedding man's blood like water--these were the very foundations of the gorgeous fabric. Any cure for these evils, except in the total sweeping away of the whole order of society, was, as we shall soon see, utterly hopeless. First of all, the prosperity which we have described was only the privilege of a favoured class. The mass of the population derived from it no benefit. The whole social system was founded on slavery. The whole domestic service, nay, the manufacturing, and what is to modern ideas far more marvellous, even the intellectual labour, was performed by slaves. It is calculated that in Rome itself the slave population was twice or three times as numerous as the free. These slaves were drawn from races fully equal to their masters in natural gifts, they were often their equals even in culture; and every one of these slaves was by Roman law not a person, but a thing. The male slave was not a man, the female slave not a woman. 'The slave is without rights, without a family, without a God.'[6] The hideous moral pollution which this state of law not merely rendered possible, but consecrated, is defended from exposure in the language of a Christian country by its unutterable, inconceivable foulness; and of the moral system of heathen Rome, as a whole, the same must be said. It is like the beast of the American prairies, which no hunter dare touch because it emits a stench which none can endure. We are well aware that this of necessity prevents our exhibiting this side of the question with anything like justice. Let us thank God that, far as our age has fallen beneath the standard of Christianity, it is still so much pervaded by Christian instincts that no writer, not even the most utterly abandoned in his personal character, would dare to publish to the world what was practised without shame or concealment by men who were esteemed free from reproach and models of virtue. 'It is a shame even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.' Thus much, however, we may say, that the men whom the heathen Romans honoured, not merely for greatness, but especially for virtue, lived without shame in all the horrors described by St. Paul in that terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; and poets, as deeply pervaded as man ever was with a sense of the beautiful, nay, who undertook to be the moral reformers of their age, introduced into the midst of their most delicious strains not mention merely, but