merely to compress the nations by conquest under her own sceptre. She was perfectly willing-nay, earnestly desirous-that the nations should not be compressed, that her conquests should be of such a nature as to leave them in a measure free. She wanted an empire whose glory should consist in holding other empires within it, as a drop of water holds within it a multitude of separate lives. Her political aim was unity, and unity is ever the combination, not the destruction, of the many. Her whole history, with all its changes, is an effort to conserve in the new the elements of the old. When Augustus aimed at undivided empire, he aimed at it in the Roman method; he did not break with the institutions of the past, but gathered them around his own person.1 It is but an instance in miniature of what Rome sought to do in the gross. She was willing to permit the institutions of the world to remain; she only asked that they would assume her

own name.

Now, the Roman religion follows the plan of the Roman politics; strictly speaking, it is but a part of those politics. It never aspires to originality; it would scarcely be too much to say that it aspires to be not original. Originality would have destroyed the Roman design. The Roman design in every sphere was incorporation. Incorporation demands

1 See this point very clearly stated in Dean Merivale's article "Augustus," Encyclopædia Britannica,' ninth edition.

eclecticism-the selecting of that which is best in surrounding systems. Rome's eagerness to incorporate made her unwilling to be originative. She was too anxious to gather in the old to be a founder of the new. Her aim was to find a meeting-place for the creeds of the nations. Books on popular Church history have often been misled as to her character by her attitude to Christianity. Viewing her in that attitude, they have represented her as a persecuting power. The truth is, it was the nature of Christianity and not the nature of Rome which gave rise to persecutions. Rome would have tolerated any religion which would consent to nestle under her banner. But this Christianity would not consent to do. Christianity claimed exactly what Rome claimed-to be the wide-spreading tree upon whose branches all other faiths might rest. She claimed to be the principle of union which formed a possible nucleus for the reconciliation of rival beliefs. She claimed to have been herself the unconscious source of all other aspirations-the light which had lighted the worship of every man. Christianity, therefore, could never have accepted the terms of the Roman Pantheon, could never have consented to serve in a house where she asserted the right to rule. Her distinctive characteristic was that she refused to be tolerated, insisted to be recognised alone and supreme. She brooked no rival, and she would admit no second; she demanded, like Rome herself,

the suffrages of all other faiths. It is unfair, therefore, to regard Rome's attitude towards Christianity as an exception to her usual policy. She was as willing to extend her toleration to Christianity as to any other creed, and she only exchanged her toleration for hostility because Christianity refused to tolerate her.

The result of this eclecticism is that the religion of Rome exhibits not one but many elements. Just as within her body politic there repose side by side the characteristics of many lands, so within the membership of her religious system there sleep the phases of many faiths. Rome brings no new message into the world; her mission is to collect, and, if possible, to combine, those messages which the world has already received. Accordingly, the faith of Rome is a many-sided faith; it would have been universally sided if every aspect of religion had in its day been represented. It took whatever it found. It gathered stones from all surrounding temples, and out of these it built a temple of its own-a temple not very symmetrical indeed, not very harmoniously welded nor aptly adjusted, yet exhibiting a faithful and honest attempt to find in one Pantheon a place for many minds. Let us look at one or two of the different sides of this religion.

It has one aspect in which it bears a resemblance to the faith of Judea. Whence that resemblance originates we cannot tell, but it is highly probable that

the far-travelling and eagerly incorporating spirit of Rome came at an early date into contact with Judaic forms of thought.1 Be this as it may, it is certain that in Rome, as in Judea, we find the union of two tendencies which, so far as I know, are in no other faith found combined the tendency to dwell in the past, and the impulse to push forward into the future. China has exhibited the one, and Parsism has revealed the other; but it has been reserved for Judea and Rome alone to find a meeting-place for both. In Rome, as in Judea, we see hands stretched out in opposite directions - one pointing backward to the gates of a golden paradise, the other pointing forward to the gates of a future kingdom. In the one, as in the other, we behold the spectacle of a mind divided between the pride of a high origin and the expectation of a lofty destiny, vibrating between a glory which has been and a splendour which is coming. If Judea goes back to her Eden, Rome goes back to her Troy; if Judea looks forward to her Messiah, Rome looks forward to her universal dominion. The actual life of each is bounded by two paradises -the glory of a lofty ancestry and the glory of an omnipotent posterity. And in the life of each

1 Renan says that it is probable Judaic thought would reach Rome earlier than even nearer parts of the empire. See his 'Influence of the Institutions, Thought, and Culture of Rome on Christianity and the Development of the Catholic Church,' Hibbert Lecture,

the power which mediates between the one and the other is the power of law. In Judea and in Rome alike, the minds of men are developed from the paradise of the past into the paradise of the future by a colossal system of jurisprudence, by which the will of each man is subjugated, and the will of each adjusted to the will of all-a jurisprudence which in both cases has left upon the ages an everlasting impress, and has exerted a permanent influence upon institutions and civilisations foreign to its own.

It will be seen from this that at the root of the Roman religion there lies an element not commonly found in the faiths of the pre-Christian world-the element of morality. In Rome, as in Judea, the conception of law is an ethical conception; it is founded on the reciprocal duties of man to man, and on the duties of all to the body politic. The result is that in the early stages of her history the religion of Rome exhibits, as Mommsen remarks, an aspect of great seriousness. It is unlike other systems of Polytheism in the solemnity with which it approaches the problems of life. If it deifies the powers of nature, it does so not on the ground of their contribution to sensuous joy, but on the ground of their possible service to humanity. The object of the Roman's reverence, like the object of the Jew's

1

1 Mommsen, indeed, shows how, afterwards, the corruption of the Roman mind destroyed this primitive reverence. See his 'Rome,' book iii. chap. xiii.