violence and rapine were restrained only by the strong arm of law
dictated by instincts of self-preservation? Where was the ennobling
influence of the gods, when nobody of any position finally believed in
them? How powerless the gods, when the general depravity was so glaring
as to call out the terrible invective of Paul, the cosmopolitan
traveller, the shrewd observer, the pure-hearted Christian missionary,
indicting not a few, but a whole people: "Who exchanged the truth of God
for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the
Creator, ... being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affections,
unmerciful." An awful picture, but sustained by the evidence of the
Roman writers of that day as certainly no worse than the
hideous reality.

If this was the outcome of the most exquisitely poetical and
art-inspiring mythology the world has ever known, what wonder that the
pure spirituality of Jesus the Christ, shining into that blackness of
darkness, should have been hailed by perishing millions as the "light of
the world"!

* * * * *

AUTHORITIES.


Rawlinson's Religions of the Ancient World; Grote's History of Greece;
Thirlwall's History of Greece; Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Max Müller's