At the time when the civilizations of Greece and Rome had reached their highest perfection, the poison of sensual indulgence, elevated into a religion, had instilled itself into the whole social life of the people: in every incident of life, in business, in pleasure, in literature, in politics, in arms, in the theatres, in the streets, in the baths, at the games, in the decorations of his home, in the ornaments and service of his table, in the very conditions of the weather and the physical phenomena of nature[521] it met the Roman, and tainted every action of his life. Archdeacon Farrar, in the first chapter of his _Early Days of Christianity_, draws an awful picture of the corruption of the old world at the moment when it was confronted by Christianity. The parent had absolute power over the person of his child, and could destroy its life at its pleasure. Unfortunate children were exposed on the roadside or left to perish in the waters of the Tiber. The slave was the mere chattel of his master, and Roman women treated their servants with the utmost barbarity. Juvenal has painted for us in terrible colours the vices and shameless conduct of the women, and the selfish luxury and degrading pleasures of the men; the nameless crime, which was the disgrace of Greek and Roman civilization, was looked upon as merely a question of taste; and St. Paul, in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, has recorded for all time what was the highest the most perfect civilization Paganism has ever produced was able to effect for the moral condition of the people. To the Roman and Greek world, saturated with the most perfect philosophy the world has ever known, and adorned by the art which has ever since been the despair of its imitators, there presented itself the Catholic Church, and before the sun’s embrace sublime “Night wist Her work done, and betook herself in mist To marsh and hollow, there to bide her time Blindly in acquiescence.”[522]