lessons of Christianity. Or it may be that the man of our day, with
all these advantages, does not keep himself clean--that so many
go astray that public opinion shall almost seem to tremble in the
balance. Even with us this and that abomination becomes allowable
because so many do it. With the Romans, in the time of Cicero, greed,
feeding itself on usury, rapine, and dishonesty, was so fully the
recognized condition of life that its indulgence entailed no disgrace.
But Cicero, with eyes within him which saw farther than the eyes of
other men, perceived the baseness of the stain. It has been said also
of him that he was not altogether free from reproach. It has been
suggested that he accepted payment for his services as an advocate,
any such payment being illegal. The accusation is founded on the
knowledge that other advocates allowed themselves to be paid, and
on the belief that Cicero could not have lived as he did without an
income from that source. And then there is a story told of him that,
though he did much at a certain period of his life to repress the
usury, and to excite at the same time the enmity of a powerful friend,
he might have done more. As we go on, the stories of these things will
be told; but the very nature of the allegations against him prove how
high he soared in honesty above the manners of his day. In discussing
the character of the men, little is thought of the robberies of
Sylla, the borrowings of Caesar, the money-lending of Brutus, or the
accumulated wealth of Crassus. To plunder a province, to drive usury
to the verge of personal slavery, to accept bribes for perjured
judgment, to take illegal fees for services supposed to be gratuitous,
was so much the custom of the noble Romans that we hardly hate his
dishonest greed when displayed in its ordinary course. But because
Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then,
suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in
the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in his