brought the greatest hope into the world has also brought the greatest
fear. By increasing the value of life, our religion has increased the
fear of death. By quickening the conscience, it has quickened the
imagination; and that death which to the man conscious only of a
physical existence is the mere natural termination of life, to the
nature convinced of sin is a violent breach of the beautiful order of
the world, and the gate to final retribution. The ancient Roman was
but a child in spiritual apprehension, and therefore as a child he
surrendered his happy pagan life as thoughtlessly as the weary child
falls asleep at the end of its play. No terrors of futurity darkened
his last hours; he had his own turn at the feast of life, and as a
satisfied guest he was content to depart and make room for others. As
cheerfully as he had formerly begun his ordinary journeys from Rome
through a street of tombs, so now he took the last journey, he knew
not whither, through the valley of the shadow of death, and feared no
evil; not because a greater Power was with him to defend him, but
because for him no evil except the common pangs of dissolution
existed. All that he cared for in death was that he should not be
altogether separated from the presence and the enjoyments of human
life, from the haunts where he had been so happy. He wished to have
his tomb on the public thoroughfare, that he might "feel, as it were,
the tide of life as it flowed past his monument, and that his mute
existence might be prolonged in the remembrance of his friends." I may
observe that the Roman custom of bordering the public roads with tombs
gives a significance to the inscriptions which some of them
bore,--such as, _Siste, viator_--_Aspice, viator_, "Stop,
traveller"--"Look, traveller"; a significance which is altogether lost
when the same inscriptions are carved, as we have often seen them, on
tombstones in secluded country churchyards where no traveller ever
passes by, and hardly even friends come to weep.