which we are besought to substitute for the Sermon on the Mount, he
was openly accused of constant and shameless iniquity, and was leading
his distinguished and tender pupil, Nero, into those practises and
preparing him for those atrocities which Seneca himself had upon his
own soul while he wrote his book on clemency. At that hour the Bible
Christianity offered to the world's heart and aspiration, not a book,
not a theorist of morals, but a man for the leadership of humanity,
and, of that Man the literary and calm French skeptic says: "Jesus
will never be surpassed." In the age of Rome, when people were not
burdened by churches or Bibles, Lucian says: "If any one loves wealth
and is dazed by gold; if any one measures happiness by purple and
power; if any one brought up among flatterers and slaves has never had
a conception of liberty, frankness and truth; if any one has wholly
surrendered himself to pleasure, full tables, carousals, lewdness,
sorcery, and deceit, let him go to Rome." There was no Bible either
to preach against it or to interfere with it. These things were the
product then, as they are now, of infidelity. Whenever the world
wishes a civilization so barbarous as that, the reviler of the Bible
must create it, for they have the applause of evil and the good-will
of crime. In the age of Rome, when this skepticism was the creed of
the State, Nero got tired of the goddess Astarte, and murdered his own
brother, his wife, and his mother, and the senate was so affected with
the same opinion that they heard his justification and proceeded to
heap new honors upon him. He threw the preacher Paul into jail, but
there Paul wrought out the impulse of Europe. In the age when the
great Livy said that "neglect of gods" had come, Caligula let loose
his imperial frenzy, and every stream of blood that could be sent
toward the sea carried its red tide. In that age when, like later
eloquent critics, Ennius said that he did not believe that the gods
thought of human beings, "for if the gods concerned themselves about