You will remember how, for the crime of a single slave, the entire household of a Roman patrician, four hundred innocent human beings, were led in chains across the Forum and murdered by what was called law. You will remember the exquisite Nero, who, in his love of art, to throw himself more fully into the genius of Greek tragedy, committed incest with his mother that he might be a second (Edipus, and assassinated her that he might realise the sensations of Orestes. You will recall one scene which Tacitus describes, not as exceptional or standing alone, but merely, he says, 'quas ut exemplum re-feram ne saepius eadem prodigentia narranda sit '— the hymeneal night-banquet on Agrippa's lake, graced by the presence of the wives and daughters of the Roman senators, where amidst blazing fireworks and music and cloth-of-gold pavilions and naked prostitutes, the majesty of the Caesars celebrated his nuptials with a boy.
There, I conceive, was the visible product of material civilisation, where there was no fear of God in the mid- dle of it—the final outcome of wealth and prosperity and art and culture, raised aloft as a sign for all ages to look upon.
But it is not to this, nor to the fire of hell which in due time burst out to consume it, that I desire now to draw your attention. I have to point out to you two purifying movements which were at work in the midst of the pollution, one of which came to nothing and survives only in books, the second a force which was to mould for ages the future history of man. Both require our notice, for both singularly
