INTRODUCTION.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CONDITION OF CHRISTENDOM.
At Rome, eighteen centuries ago this very year, Nero was
married to a maiden called Octavia. He was the son of
Ahenobarbus and Agrippina; the son of a father so
abandoned and a mother so profligate that when congratulated by
his friends on the birth of his first child, and that child a son,
the father said, what is born of such a father as I, and such
a mother as my wife, can only be for the ruin of the State.
Octavia was yet worse born. She was the daughter of Claudius
and Messalina. Claudius was the Emperor of Home,
stupid by nature, licentious and drunken by long habit, and
infamous for cruelty in that age never surpassed for its
oppressiveness, before or since. Messalina, his third wife, was
a monster of wickedness, who had every vice that can
disgrace the human kind, except avarice and hypocrisy: her
boundless prodigality saved her from avarice, and her matchless
impudence kept her clean from hypocrisy. Too
incontinent even of money to hoard it, she was so careless of the
opinions of others that she made no secret of any vice. Her
name is still the catchword for the most loathsome acts that
can be conceived of. She was put to death for attempting
to destroy her husband's life; he was drunk when he signed
the warrant, and when he heard that his wife had been
assassinated at his command he went to drinking again.
Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and the bitterest enemy of Messalina, took her place in a short time, and became the fourth wife of her uncle Claudius, who succeeded to the last and deceased husband of Agrippina only as he succeeded to the first Roman king—a whole commonwealth of predecessors intervening. Octavia, aged eleven, was already espoused to another, who took his life when his bride's father married the
