1. State of the World at Messiah's Birth.--The world had grown {30} old, and the dotage of its paganism was marked by hideous excesses. Atheism in belief was followed, as among all nations it has always been, by degradation of morals, iniquity seemed to have run its course to the very farthest goal. Philosophy had abrogated its boasted functions except for the favored few. Crime was universal, and there was no known remedy for the horror and ruin which it was causing in a thousand hearts. Remorse itself seemed to be exhausted, so that men were past feeling. There was a callosity of heart, a petrifying of the moral sense, which even those who suffered from it felt to be abnormal and portentous. Even the heathen world felt that "the fullness of the time" had come.--Canon Farrar. 2. Policy of Rome in Respect to Religion.--The policy of the emperors and the senate, so far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And this toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. * * * Avarice and taste very frequently despoiled the vanquished nations of the elegant statues of their gods and the rich ornaments of their temples; but in the exercise of the religion which they derived from their ancestors, they uniformly experienced the indulgence, and even protection of the Roman conquerors. The province of Gaul seems, and indeed only seems, an exception to this universal toleration. Under the specious pretext of abolishing human sacrifices, the emperors Tiberius and Claudius suppressed the dangerous power of the Druids; but the priests themselves, their gods and their altars, subsisted in peaceful obscurity till the final fall of paganism. * * * Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.--Gibbon. 3. Mysteries of the Pagan Religion.--It has been maintained that the design of at least some of these mysteries was to inculcate the grand principles of natural religion, such as the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, the importance of virtue, etc., and to explain the vulgar polytheism as symbolical of these great truths. But this certainly needs better proof. It is more probable that the later pagan philosophers, who lived after the light of Christianity had exposed the abominations of polytheism, were the principal authors of this moral interpretation of the vulgar religion, which they falsely pretended was taught in the mysteries, while in reality, those mysteries were probably mere supplements to the vulgar mythology and worship, and of the same general character and spirit.--Murdock.