the human race the good would prosper and the bad suffer," the
courtesan was kept for pleasure and the wife for domestic slavery. In
that happy age of unbelief, when Menander sung "the gods do not care
for men," "the homes were," according to Juvenal, "broken up before
the nuptial garland faded"; and according to Tertullian, "they married
only to be divorced." Friends exchanged wives; infanticide and other
hellish crimes were common. This is what that spirit, in its purity,
did for the home, when there was no Bible to read at its hearthstone
and no New Testament to put into the hands of young lovers departing
to make a new rooftree.

Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible. In that age,
when "God was dead"; in that age, when "the gods had abdicated";
they said, "the mechanic's occupation is degrading. A workshop is
incompatible with anything noble." The curse of slavery had blotted
the name of labor, and they agreed that "a purchased laborer is better
than a hired one," and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to
conceal the myriads of slaves. In that age Nero, who had the same
opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which calls itself liberal
has today, had a "golden house" as large as a city, with colonnades a
mile long, and within it a statue of Nero 120 feet high. That is what
the theory of infidelity did for labor and the working man when it
was on the throne. Do you wonder that from that day to this the
"carpenter's son" of the Bible has been scoffed at by this infidelity?

In that age, when the theories of infidelity ruled, the gladiators
made wet with their blood the great enclosure of the arena. The women
and timid girls of Rome gave lightly the sign of death. The crowd
shook the building with applause as the palpitating body was dragged
by a hook into the death-chamber, and slaves turned up the bloody soil