The investigations of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the long buried cities, and the common accounts of historians of Paul’s day, all show that this picture was not at all overdrawn. There was a most terrible need of Christianity just then to save the empire from falling to pieces by reason of its rottenness. Milman most graphically pictures the change that Christianity gradually wrought in the religious condition of Rome. He says: “Christianity was gradually withdrawing some of all orders, even slaves, out of the vices, the ignorance, the misery of that corrupted social system. It was even instilling feelings of humanity, yet unknown or coldly commended by an impotent philosophy, among men and women whose infant ears had been habituated to the shrieks of dying gladiators; it was giving dignity to minds prostrated by years, almost centuries, of degrading despotism; it was nurturing purity and modesty of manner in an unspeakable state of depravation; it was enshrining the marriage-bed in a sanctity long almost entirely lost, and rekindling to a steady warmth the domestic affections; it was substituting a simple, calm and rational faith for the worn-out superstitions of heathenism; gently establishing in the soul of man the sense of immortality, till it became a natural and inextinguishable part of his moral being.” With this striking description of the historian, compare the poetic lines of Matthew Arnold: “On that hard pagan world disgust And sated loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Make human life a hell. In his cool hall with haggard eyes The Roman noble lay, He drove abroad in furious guise Along the Appian way. He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers; No easier, nor no quicker passed The impracticable hours.” CHAPTER X. OUR ANCESTORS. To the Aryan of the West not merely the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon and stars, or the earth with its trees and springs, its fountains, or the sea with its storms and calms, but all things visible, as organs and instruments of Deity, were deserving of reverent adoration. Nothing was too trifling. The quivering leaf, the crackling flame, the falling thunderbolt, the flight or song of birds, the neighing of horses, man’s dreams and visions, even the movements of his pulse, all claimed attention, all might give some sign from the other world. All nature had a voice for the imaginative Teuton. The skies, the woods, the springs, the well, the lake, the hill, were his books, his oracles, his divinities.--G. F. MACLEAR.