And how does he think of this new divinity, Christ? As a Roman citizen necessarily, and to a Roman citizen Christ was nothing more than a vulgar, common criminal executed by Roman law in company with thieves and murderers. Therefore he addresses such a divinity with scorn, even in the hour of his triumph: O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods! O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end! To understand the terrible bitterness of this scorn, it is necessary for the student to remember that a Roman citizen could not be tortured or flogged or gibbeted. Such punishments and penalties were reserved for slaves and for barbarians. Therefore to a Roman the mere fact of Christ's death and punishment--for he was tortured before being crucified--was a subject for contempt; accordingly he speaks of such a divinity as the "leavings of racks and rods"--that is, so much of a man's body as might be left after the torturers and executioners had finished with it. Should a Roman citizen kneel down and humble himself before that? A little while, some thousands of years, perhaps, Christianity may be a triumphant religion, but all religions must die and pass away, one after another, and this new and detestable religion, with its ugly gods, must also pass away. For although the old Roman has studied too much philosophy to believe in all that his fathers believed, he believes in a power that is greater than man and gods and the universe itself, in the unknown power which gives life and death, and makes perpetual change, and sweeps away everything that man foolishly believes to be permanent. He gives to this law of impermanency the name of the goddess of death, but the name makes little difference; he has recognised the eternal law. Time will sweep away Christianity itself, and his description of this mighty wave of time is one of the finest passages in all his poetry: All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past: . . . . . . . . . Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings, And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things, White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled, Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.