heavy penalty. This provision, as M. Beugnot observes, implies a mistrust of the magistracy. Yet this law was apparently very ineffective. Nothing took place like the systematic demolitions in some cities of the east. Another edict of the same period, framed singularly in the spirit of those which Dioclesian had formerly directed against Christianity, excluded all the enemies of the Catholic faith from all the great public offices. Yet at this time some of the most important charges, especially in the army, were in the hands of pagans. A pagan, named Generides, who commanded a considerable part of the army, threw up his charge, and refused an offered exemption from the law. The emperor was forced to repeal the decree. In fact, indirectly and for a time, the protector of the pagan temples was that very Goth who is in general considered the author of their ruin. The progress and the power of Alaric rendered all imperial laws issued by Honorius a dead letter. What is more singular is, that Attalus, the puppet emperor, who was set up at Rome, was a pagan; during his reign the pagan Generides commanded all the effective forces. The empire of the west thus offered a spectacle, of which no one could have had a conception. At Ravenna a Christian emperor and a Christian court; at Rome a pagan emperor and a pagan court. . . . while the sword of Alaric kept the two parties asunder and enforced mutual respect.' Zosimus relates that the fear of Alaric forced even the Christian inhabitants of Rome to listen at least to proposals for the destruction of the enemy by pagan magic. Etruscan soothsayers were to blast his army with lightning. The pope himself acceded to the proposition. It is still more remarkable that a Christian historian asserts that the sacrifices actually took place, though only attended by pagans; while, on the other hand, the pagan Zosimus says that the senate not daring to attend, the Etrurians were dismissed, and the more effective means, the offer of a great sum of money, employed to arrest the movements of the Goth. 6 The capture of Rome by Alaric consummated the ruin of paganism, not by the destruction of the temples, for temples and churches were exposed only to the same danger, but by the dispersion of the aristocracy, who alone cherished the proud reminiscences of the ancient faith. They fled, many of them not to return, and, scattered through the provinces of the empire, were gradually absorbed in the rapidly Christianizing mass of the population. In fact, the temples survived the worshippers. On the authority of a regionarium, composed after the capture of Rome by Alaric, the greater number of the pagan temples were still standing. But both in the city and in the country, where the church had been injured or profaned by the sacrilegious barbarians, barians, there was an active and ardent zeal ready at any cost to rebuild the fallen walls, or to restore the obliterated ornaments. The temples were left to themselves; no public authority interfered to support the tottering roof or repair the broken column; no public fund was lavished on the plundered shrine or crumbling capital; until at length the Christians, in many instances, took undisputed possession of the deserted edifice, and that reconsecration took place which alone probably has preserved, though it may have marred and disfigured, the architectural remains of antiquity. Constantine had raised Christianity, as far as the free exercise of the religion, to a level with paganism; Gratian and Theodosius had abrogated the pretensions of paganism as the established and national faith; Honorius had seized on its public edifices, and had attempted to secure to Christianity the command of the great distinctions of the state. But the profession of faith was still free: Christianity had not as yet begun to treat the belief in the ancient religion as criminal; its war with opinions was the fair strife of argument and example, and the less pure and exalted influence of imperial favour and worldly advantage. The liberty of conscience was first openly invaded by Valentinian III. Paganism indeed was a religion of rites rather than of doctrines; it consisted in observances more than in opinions. But there were private rites, which could not be suppressed without forcing a way into the closest sanctuary of life; the pagan, prohibited from sacrificing on the altars of Jove or Minerva, still secretly burned his incense on the shrine of his domestic deities, his lares or penates. In Italy especially it was a household as well as a national religion. The Christians began to inveigh against the connivance of the laws, and to proscribe this last refuge of paganism. Throughout Italy, and no doubt in other parts of the west, the country districts were still almost entirely pagan. M. Beugnot quotes a curious illustration of this fact from a poem, De Mortibus Boum, by a certain Endelechius, who lived at the beginning of the fifth century. He thus speaks of the cross and of Christ :Signum quod perhibent esse crucis Dei, Magnis qui colitur solus in urbibus.' As late as the middle of the same century, Maximus, Bishop of Turin, writes against the heathen deities, as though their worship were in full vigour in the neighbourhood of his city. Paganism indeed could not but long linger in the manners and in the habits, after its power as a religion may be fairly considered effete. After quoting several instances of pagan superstition during the reign of Valentinian III., M. Beugnot proceeds : 'Almost everywhere paganism reveals its presence. It is no longer the the powerful religion which formerly ruled over society, dictated laws, founded institutions, and seemed as it were the vital spirit of the empire; but it still predominates in the manners, it regulates the thoughts, it directs the actions of citizens; and although disarmed, although proscribed, it appears in all places; at one time it walks openly, at another it usurps the name and the insignia of Christianity; it appears determined to assume all characters, to play all parts, rather than confess its defeat.' We must express our gratitude to M. Beugnot, for directing our attention to the fragments of a late Latin poet, bearing the barbaric name of Merobaudes, which have been edited by Niebuhr. Merobaudes wrote during the reign of Valentinian, and his ambition appears to have been to rival, in favour of Aetius, the splendid verses of Claudian in praise of Stilicho. In one passage, however, he boldly impersonates some deity-Discord, as M. Beugnot supposes-who, in language almost undisguised, revives the old heathen charge, that the ruin of the empire is to be attributed to the contempt of the ancient civil and religious institutions, and the triumph of Christianity. Discord summons Bellona to take arms for the destruction of Rome. Among her fatal achievements are to be these: 'Moenia nulla tuos valeant arcere furores; Roma ipsique tremant furialia murmura reges. Pectoribus sævi demens furor æstuet auri: Omniaque hæc sine mente Jovis, sine numine summo.' Merobaudes held important commands in the army; he had the distinction of a statue placed in the forum of Trajan, of which the inscription is extant, yet we hear him, during the first half of the fifth century, almost recurring to the old accusation of atheism against Christianity-Omniaque hæc sine mente Jovis, sine numine summo at all events, indignantly deploring the banishment of the Roman gods, the extinction of the sacred fire of Vesta, and the fatal change in manners consequent on these religious innovations. M. Beugnot, of course, does not neglect to notice, though he does not insist strongly on, the inclination attributed to the em VOL. LVII. NO. CXIII. F peror The peror Anthemius, if not of restoring, of favouring the ancient religion. Nor does he omit the final suppression of the Lupercalia, the last pagan festival which united apparently the whole population of Rome, by the Pope Gelasius. It appears, indeed, that paganism, in the west at least, was allowed to die away by its own natural process of dissolution. Whatever may have been the case in the east, however stern the language of some of the laws issued by the western emperors, active and sanguinary persecution was neither, in this quarter, provoked by the pagans, nor practised by the Christians. Where the temples were demolished, it was by the missionary rather than by the soldier. services of pagans in the court and in the camp during these disastrous times were tacitly admitted. Still the signs of existence were scarcely, if we may so speak, signs of life; the vital energy was exhausted; its symbols had long ago faded from the coins and medals-here and there only an ambiguous inscription marks its being; it clung to the mind of man by the tenacity of habit, but nothing more. It lingered in the public ceremonial and in private usages, solely because it was not yet superseded by Christian forms and expressions; it remained the prevalent superstition until Christianity either adopted it as its own, or substituted something similar to satisfy the propensity of the ignorant and unenlightened mind for sensible religious images, and direct and immediate impressions. For it must be admitted that, to subdue paganism, Christianity itself began to paganise. No sooner had the political fabric of the Roman religion crumbled to pieces, than hosts of proselytes passed over to the dominant faith, according to M. Beugnot's expression, with all their baggage of superstition.' Nor did Christianity refuse to meet them half-way. The Protestant reader will smile at the naïveté of the following passage from our author : 'If it entered into the designs of Providence to temper the severe dogmas of Christianity by the consecration of some soft, tender, consolatory ideas, adapted by their very peculiarity to the nature of man, it is evident that these ideas, whatever their form, must have contributed to detach the last pagans from their errors; the worship of Mary, the mother of God, appears to have been the means employed by Providence for the completion of Christianity. Thus some prudent concessions made for a time to pagan manners, and the influence exercised by the worship of the Virgin-these were the two elements of the power employed by the church to conquer the resistance of the latest pagans.' -Beugnot, vol. ii. p. 271-272. M. Beugnot adds in a note, as a proof of the rapid manner in which the worship of Mary swept away the last vestiges of paganism, that in Sicily, which had remained to a late period obstinately obstinately attached to the ancient faith, eight celebrated temples were in a very short time turned into churches and consecrated to the Virgin. The last temple in which the pagan worship was performed in Italy was that of Apollo on Monte Casino. It was only abolished by St. Benedict about the year 529. In Gaul, Roman paganism may be traced to a still later period, especially at Treves, where the citizens were wedded to the worship of Diana. In the northern countries, however, it is difficult to ascertain the precise period of the total change; for the Christian Latin writers are so apt to confound the worship of the northern with that of the Roman pagans, Thor and Woden are so frequently meant by Jupiter and Mercurius, that we may be misled into supposing the Roman deities to have survived long after they had entirely perished from the minds of men; when in fact they were only the wild gods of the German tribes, or the mythological impersonations of the Norwegian Eddas. One most important chapter in the history of the transition from heathenism to Christianity is still wanting,-that relating to the fine arts. M. Beugnot has traced the change in the medals and in inscriptions, but he has declined this part of the subject, of which indeed the facts are scattered and obscure, and which certainly would require a separate treatise. With the heathen religion expired heathen architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry with Christianity a new sisterhood of arts gradually developed themselves, and ministered to that innate desire. of the elevated and the beautiful, which is only totally extinct with civilization itself. But the arts of heathenism, like the religion itself, were effete; their productive energy had long been exhausted. Whatever may be the case hereafter, unquestionably religion has hitherto been the prime inspiration which has kindled the human mind to great conceptions in every branch of art. Heathenism, first in its vast level masses and its colossal sculptures in Egypt, subsequently in its graceful and harmonious Grecian temples, and its images, in which the human form was wrought to such inconceivable perfection; in the music and the poetry, which had enraptured the finely-organised minds of the Greek in the theatre or in the temple-Heathenism had discharged its office. That office Christianity was about to assume with different aims and in a different form. Nothing would be more curious than to trace, if it were possible, the decay and the dissolution of the one, the rise and development of the other. To follow out what it borrowed or rejected, destroyed or modified as accurately as possible to define what parts of ancient buildings were permitted to mingle themselves up with the Chris F 2 tian |