demons of "abominable aspect." "The explosive gases of mines took on the shape of pale faces of malicious dwarfs, with leathery ears hanging down to their shoulders, and in garments of gray cloth.”* It may not be unprofitable to dwell at further length on the wild religious fanaticism that swept over the Roman Empire following the advent of the divine Nazarene, and the ultimate disruption of that Empire, since it had a close bearing on the progress of medicine. It is clearly a psychological phenomenon with which we have to deal; but its causes were in no wise related to the supernatural, in the strict sense of that word. Writers have assigned widely different causes for Rome's decline, but it seems to us none of them has discovered the underlying proximate cause of that momentous event. Carlyle designated the French Revolution of '93 "a spasm of virtue." The fall of Rome was more than that: it was a struggle for life of a people; a despairing cry to escape miseries that had become unendurable. Gibbon says Rome fell from moral disintegration of society, which is true enough. The distinguished Italian historian, Dr. Ferrero, declares with doubtful justification, that the separation of Tiberius from his beautiful wife, Julia, daughter of Augustus the Emperor, was a cause. The Rev. Dr. Theodore Woolsey3 1 Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 301. declares its fall was due to divorce and the consequent breaking up of the family, which is partly true. None of these causes can be accepted as the primary efficient cause. They were effects rather than causes. As a matter of fact, Rome was finally, after successive efforts, overrun by the Huns and Goths, the Visigoths, the Franks, and other barbarian hordes that occupied her provinces, as stated by the learned Gibbon. We maintain, nevertheless, that the efficient cause lies deeper than that which is a mere matter of observation. To find that, let us recall the condition of Roman society following the second century of the Christian era. Roman civilization had reached its zenith; Roman society had already lapsed into a state of mental apathy. The light of Athens was subsequently put out by the conquests of Alexander and Philip of Macedon, when it ceased to illumine the world. Political ambition, the love of wealth, of luxury, of power and conquest; the contempt of justice and human rights, were bearing legitimate fruits at Rome, namely, the grossest inequality. The popular ten thousand, about two per cent. of her population, owned the whole of Rome; the rest were a subject class, plebeian and slaves. It was like a pyramid standing on its apex. Without strong outside braces and supports it must fall. There is a degree of poverty that is as bad as leprosy; it was prevalent at Rome. At Rome, society was divided into two classes: the rulers, or patrician; the plebeian, the slaves and barbarians. Faith in man was dead; faith in the gods was dying; virtues were disappearing. High ideals no longer influenced the motives of the ruling caste. When an individual lapses into this mental condition he has begun to die; it is no less true of a people and a nation. “Around the shores of the Mediterranean," writes Dr. Draper, "the conquered nations looked at one another, partakers of a common misfortune, associated in a common lot. Not one of them had found a god to help her in her day of need. Europe, Asia, Africa, were tranquil, but it was the tranquillity of despair." The rich of the capital were rotting in the vice of pomp and luxury; the rest of her people were sunk in pitiless poverty, and the direst, most hopeless woe. The family was going to pieces because the daughters of the rich had patrimonies which made them independent of their husbands. Ignorance and want in the humbler classes, excess of luxury and selfish indulgence in the higher or ruling class, bred endless forms of vice and disease-legitimate products, every one. Despair of suffering without prospect of relief, of dying without hope of justice—had settled down upon the multitude like a pall. The light that the race of men needed to illuminate the darkness that besets its pathway had been wanting. There was no hope of betterIntellectual Development of Europe, p. 196. ment in the prospective to beckon it on. Life for the common people at Rome had so many hardships, was enveloped in so great a darkness, was full of so many trials, that to escape them by death, could they but find in the beyond hope of relief from suffering and oppression-to escape from a life which had so few joys, so many miseries, so little hope in any turn of events-was a desire that had taken possession of the multitude. Christianity, pure and simple, had thriven under its persecutions, but waned and became corrupt when they were withheld. And it was this condition of apathy on the part of the public mind, toward the subsistence of a State from which for them there was nothing to hope or to expect, that ultimately made its stays weak and effeminate, and an easy prey to an aggressive foe, by which she was subsequently overrun. The converts of the new faith would fight for the glory of God, but not for a State substantially pagan, oppressive, and hateful. The props and stays of the inverse pyramid were thus being gradually undermined with results which the world has seen. Such, in a few words, was the physical and moral condition of the people in and about Rome two centuries after the advent of the divine Nazarene. One cannot wonder that the great heart of Jesus was moved with compassion for the suffering multitude, the poor, the outcast, the diseased, the despised; nor that he was "touched with a feeling of their infirmities," as St. Paul wrote; nor that he wept at the sight of the hopeless miseries of the world. Neither can one be surprised, in view of the awful condition to which society had drifted by centuries of war and oppression, of ignorance, injustice and inequality, with no hope of abatement, that Jesus should counsel temporal things to be left in the hands of the State, and that His followers should turn their attention to, and place their hopes upon, a life to come, in a sphere beyond and above mortality, where greed and selfishness, disease and crime, war and its cruelties had no existence. It seems a pity that Jesus' advice was not taken and scrupulously followed. The overpowering sympathy of Jesus, the love that animated his heart toward humanity, a sympathy of such breadth and tenderness as to command the reverent admiration of the world, was a phenomenon in the history of mankind. The library established by Ptolemy, with its rich treasures of MSS. and works of art of every conceivable variety, the accumulations of two hundred or more years after the death of that great pagan, was first burnt by Cæsar in the first century of the Christian era, and rebuilt by his paramour, Cleopatra. Such books as escaped destruction were turned over to her to form a nucleus of a new library. It was again destroyed nearly three centuries later, by zealots of Christian |