treated with severity by a tribune, who feared lest they should be delivered from the prison by enchantment, Perpetua remonstrated with a kind of mournful pleasantry, and said that, if ill-used, they would do no credit to the birthday of Cæsar: the victims ought to be fattened for the sacrifice. But their language and demeanour was not always so calm and gentle; the words of some became those of defiance-almost of insult; and this is related with as much admiration as the more tranquil sublimity of the former incidents. To the people who gazed on them, in their importunate curiosity, at their agape, they said, "Is not to-morrow's spectacle enough to saliate your hate? To-day you look on us with friendly faces, tomorrow you will be our deadly enemies. Mark well our countenances, that you may know them again on the day of judgment. And to Hilarianus, on his tribunal, they said, "Thou judgest us, but God will judge thee." At this language, the exasperated people demanded that they should be scourged. When taken out to execution they declined, and were permitted to decline, the profane dress in which they were to be clad; the men, that of the priests of Saturn; the women, that of the priestesses of Ceres (1). They came forward in their simple attire, Perpetua singing psalms. The men were exposed to leopards and bears; the women were hung up naked in nets, to be gored by a furious cow. But even the excited populace shrunk with horror at the spectacle of two young and delicate women, one recently recovered from childbirth, in this state. They were recalled by acclamation, and in mercy brought forward again, clad in loose robes (2). Perpetua was tossed, her garment was rent; but, more conscious of her wounded modesty than of pain, she drew the robe over the part of her person which was exposed. She then calmly clasped up her hair, because it did not become a martyr to suffer with dishevelled locks, the sign of sorrow. She then raised up the fainting and mortally wounded Felicitas, and the cruelty of the populace being for a time appeased, they were permitted to retire. Perpetua seemed wrapt in ecstacy, and as if awaking from sleep, inquired when she was to be exposed to the beast. She could scarcely be made to believe what had taken place; her last words tenderly admonished her brother to be stedfast in the faith. We may close the scene by intimating that all were speedily released from their sufferings, and entered into their glory. Perpetua guided with her own hand the merciful sword of the gladiator which relieved her from her agony.. Caracalla Geta. This African persecution, which laid the seeds of future schisms and fatal feuds, lasted til, at least, the second year of Caracalla. From its close, except during the short reign of Maximin, Chris-217. (1) This was an unusual circumstance; and ascribed to the devil. (2) I am not sure that I am correct in this part of the version; it appears to me to be the sense. A. D. 211 lus empe ror. tianity enjoyed uninterrupted peace till the reign of Decius (1). But, during this períod occurred a remarkable event in the religious history of Rome. The pontiff of one of the wild forms of the Nature-worship of the East appeared in the city of Rome as Emperor; the ancient rites of Baalpeor, but little changed in the course of ages, intruded themselves into the sanctuary of the Capitoline Jove, and offended at once the religious majesty and the graver deElagaba cency of Roman manners (2). Elagabalus derived his name from the Syrian appellative of the sun; he had been educated in the preA. D. 218. cincts of the temple; and the Emperor of Rome was lost and absorbed in the priest of an effeminate superstition. The new religion did not steal in under the modest demeanour of a stranger, claiming the common rites of hospitality, as the national faith of a subject people: it ́entered with a public pomp, as though to supersede and eclipse the ancestral deities of Rome. The god Elagabalus was conveyed in solemn procession through the wondering provinces; his symbols were received with all the honour of the Supreme Deity. The conical black stone, which was adored at Emesa, was, no doubt, in its origin, one of those obscene symbols which appear in almost every form of the Oriental nature-worship. The rudeness of ancient art had allowed it to remain in less offensive shapelessness; and, not improbably, the original symbolic meaning had become obsolete. The Sun had become the visible type of Deity, and the object of adoration. The mysterious principle of generation, of which, in the primitive religion of nature, he was the type and image, gave place to the noblest object of human idolatry-the least debasing representative of the Great Supreme. The idol of Emesa entered Rome in solemn procession; a magnificent temple was built upon the Palatine Hill; a number of altars stood round, on which every day the most sumptuous offeringshecatombs of oxen, countless sheep, the most costly aromatics, the choicest wines were offered; streams of blood and wine were constantly flowing down; while the highest dignitaries of the empire -commanders of legions, rulers of provinces, the gravest senators, appeared as humble ministers, clad in the loose and flowing robes and linen sandals of the East, among the lascivious dances and the wanton music of oriental drums and cymbals. These degrading practices were the only way to civil and military preferment. The whole senate and equestrian order stood around; and those who played ill the part of adoration, or whose secret murmurs incautiously betrayed their devout indignation (for this insult to the ancient religion of Rome awakened some sense of shame in the degenerate and servile aristocracy), were put to death. The most sacred (1) From 212 to 249.:- Caracalla, 211; Macrinus, 217; Elagabalus, 218; Alexander Severus, 222, Maximin and the Gordiaus, 235-244; Philip, 244; Decius, 249. (2) Lampridii Heliogabalus. Dion Cassius, 1. Ixxix. Herodian. v. of the sun and patriotic sentiments cherished above all the hallowed treasures of the city, the Palladium, the image of Minerva. Popular veneration worshipped, in distant awe, the unseen deity; for profane eye might never behold the virgin image. The inviolability of the Roman dominion was inseparably connected with the uncontaminated sanctity of the Palladium. The Syrian declared his intention of wedding the ancient tutelary goddess to his foreign deity. The image was publicly brought forth; exposed to the sullying gaze of the multitude; solemnly wedded, and insolently repudiated by the unworthy stranger. A more appropriate bride was found in the Worship kindred Syrian deity, worshipped under the name of Astarte in the in Rome. East, in Carthage, as the Queen of Heaven-Venus Urania, as. translated into the mythological language of the West. She was brought from Carthage. The whole city - the whole of Italy-was commanded to celebrate the bridal festival; and the nuptials of the two foreign deities might appear to complete the triumph over the insulted divinities of Rome. Nothing was sacred to the voluptuous Syrian. He introduced the manners as well as the religion of the East; his rapid succession of wives imitated the polygamy of an Oriental despot; and his vices not merely corrupted the morals, but insulted the most sacred feelings, of the people. He tore a vestal virgin from her sanctuary, to suffer his polluting embraces; he violated the sanctuary itself; attempted to make himself master of the mystic coffer in which the sacred deposit was enshrined it was said that the pious fraud of the priesthood deceived him with a counterfeit, which he dashed to pieces in his anger. It was openly asserted, that the worship of the sun, under his name of Elagabalus, was to supersede all other worship. If we may believe the biographies in the Augustan history, a more ambitious scheme of a Religious universal religion had dawned upon the mind of the Emperor; and tions methat the Jewish, the Samaritan, even the Christian, were to be fused and recast into one great system, of which the sun was to be the central object of adoration (1). At all events, the deities of Rome were actually degraded before the public gaze into humble ministers of Elagabalus. Every year of the Emperor's brief reign, the god was conveyed from his Palatine temple to a suburban edifice of still more sumptuous magnificence. The statue passed in a car drawn by six horses. The Emperor of the world, his eyes stained with paint, ran and danced before it with antic gestures of adoration. The earth was strewn with gold dust; flowers and chaplets were scattered by the people, while the images of all the other gods, the splendid ornaments and vessels of all their temples, were carried, like the spoils of subject nations, in the annual ovation of the (1) Id agens ne quis Romnæ Deus nisi Heliogabulus coleretur. Dicebat præterea, Judæorum et Samaritanorum religiones, et Christianam devo. tionem, illuc transferendam, ut omnium cultura. innova. ditated by Elagabalus. Alexander Phoenician deity. Even human sacrifices, and if we may credit the monstrous fact, the most beautiful sons of the noblest families, were offered on the altar of this Moloch of the East (1). It is impossible to suppose that the weak and crumbling edifice of Paganism was not shaken to its base by this extraordinary revolution. An ancient religion cannot thus be insulted without losing much of its majesty its hold upon the popular veneration is violently torn asunder. With its more sincere volaries, the general animosity to foreign, particularly to Eastern, religions, might be enflamed or deepened; and Christianity might share in some part of the detestation excited by the excesses of a superstition so opposite in its nature. But others whose faith had been shaken, and whose moral feelings revolted, by a religion whose essential character was sensuality, and whose licentious tendency had been so disgustingly illustrated by the unspeakable pollutions of its imperial patron, would hasten to embrace that purer faith which was most remote from the religion of Elagabalus. From the policy of the court, as well as the pure and amiable character of the successor of Elagabalus, the more offensive parts of A. D. 222. this foreign superstition disappeared with their imperial patron. But the old Román religion was not reinstated in its jealous and unmingled dignity. Alexander Severus had been bred in another school; and the influence which swayed him, during the earlier part at least of his reign, was of a different character from that which had formed the mind of Elagabalus. It was the mother of Elagabalus who, however she might blush with shame at the impurities of her effeminate son, had consecrated him to the service of the deity in Emesa. The mother of Alexander Severus, the able, perhaps Mammaa. crafty and rapacious, Mainmæa, had at least held intercourse with the Christians of Syria. She had conversed with the celebrated Origen, and listened to his exhortations, if without conversion, still not without respect. Alexander, though he had neither the religious education, the pontifical character, nor the dissolute manners, of his predecessor, was a Syrian, with no hereditary attachment to the Roman form of Paganism. He seems to have affected a kind of universalism he paid decent respect to the gods of the Capitol; he held in honour the Egyptian worship, and enlarged the temples of Isis and Serapis. In his own palace, with respectful indifference, he enshrined, as it were, as his household deities, the representatives of the different religious or theophilosophic systems which were prevalent in the Roman empire,-Orpheus, Abraham, Christ, and Apollonius of Tyana. The first of these represented the wisdom of the mysteries, the purified nature-worship, which had laboured to elevate the popular mythology into a noble and coherent allegorism. (1) Cædit et humanas hostias, lectis ad hoc pueris nobilibus et decoris per omnem Italiam patrimis et matrimis, credo ut major esset utrique parenti dolor. Lamprid. Heliogabalus. It is singular that Abraham, rather than Moses, was placed at the head of Judaism: it is possible that the traditionary sanctity which attached to the first parent of the Jewish people, and of many of the Arab tribes, and which was afterwards embodied in the Mahometan Koran, was floating in the East, and would comprehend, as it were, the opinions not only of the Jews, but of a much wider circle of the Syrian natives. In Apollonius, was centered the more modern Theurgy, the magic which commanded the intermediate spirits between the higher world and the world of man; the more spiritual polytheism which had released the subordinate deities from their human form, and maintained them in a constant intercourse with the soul of man. Christianity, in the person of its founder, even where it did not command authority as a religion, had nevertheless lost the character under which it had so long and so unjustly laboured, of animosity to mankind. Though he was considered but as one of the sages who shared in the homage paid to their beneficent wisdom, the followers of Jesus had now lived down all the bitter hostility which had so generally prevailed against them. The homage of Alexander Severus may be a fair test of the general sentiment of the more intelligent Heathen of his time (1). It is clear that the exclusive spirit of Greek and Roman civilisation is broken down it is not now Socrates or Plato, Epicurus or Zeno, who are considered the sole guiding intellects of human wisdom. These Eastern barbarians are considered rivals, if not superior, to the philosophers of Greece. The world is betraying its irresistible yearning towards a religion; and these were the first overtures, as it were, to more general submission. change in the rela tion of nity to In the reign of Alexander Severus, at least commenced the great change in the outward appearance of Christianity. Christian bishops were admitted, even at the court, in a recognised official character; Christiaand Christian churches began to rise in different parts of the empire, society. and to possess endowments in land (2). To the astonishment of the Heathen, their religion had as yet appeared without temple or altar; their religious assemblies had been held in privacy it was yet a domestic worship. Even the Jew had his public synagogue or his more secluded proseucha; but where the Christians met was indicated by no separate and distinguished dwelling; the cemetery of their dead, the sequestered grove, the private chamber, contained their peaceful assemblies. Their privacy was at once their security and their danger. On the one hand, there was no well-known edifice in which the furious and excited rabble could surprise the general (1) Jablonski wrote a very ingenious essay to show that Alexander Severus was converted to Gnostic Christianity. Opuscula, vol. iv. Compare Heyne, Opuscula, vi. p. 169, et seqq. (2) Tillemont, as Gibbon observes, assigns the date of the earliest Christian churches to the reign of Alexander Severus; Mr. Moyle to that of Gallienus, The difference is very slight, and after |