phatic, if more obscure. The Christian Church of Jerusalem, divinely warned, had retired to Pella at the commencement of the siege. While Christianity, in Greece and Asia Minor, spread its freedom through large and powerful communities, the little Church at Pella still retained its adherence to some of the Mosaic rites, and its attachment to Jerusalem. It was the last link by which Providence still suffered its Church to be bound to the decayed commonwealth of Judah. Pella was the city of refuge, the last spot opened for the Jew flying from the avengers of his bloodguiltiness. But it was now to be closed. The Bishops of the Church had been always of the race of Abraham; on the fall of Barchochebas, they elected a Bishop from the Gentiles, renounced their Mosaic observances, and thus cut down the bridge between Judaism and Christianity for ever1.

1 Euseb. L. iii.-Le Clerc. H. Eccl. Gibbon.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

PAGANISM.

THE Roman empire was now to perish. One of the high uses for which it was made, had been fulfilled in the extirpation of Judah. Its final use was the diffusion of Christianity. From the period of the Jewish overthrow, the fall of Rome began to be announced by those signs, which, carelessly regarded as they may be by the multitude, are proofs to the philosopher and the Christian. The empire was still resistless; the leviathan still threw the political ocean into tumult, and swept through the tempest with his accustomed command but the ebb was inevitably come, and he must be laid dry upon the shore.

Within sixty-two years of the last pollution of Jerusalem, the accession of Commodus to the throne was the direct signal of convulsion. From this time, the personal vices and intolerable tyranny of the emperors kindling the passions of a people of slaves; every shape of lordly guilt, and popular profligacy, as if they had been raised

from a darker bed than of this world, stalked in daylight through the empire. The heart revolts from those scenes of the naked criminality of man. But they belong to the history of a popular mind, abandoned to the impulses of human nature. Half the empire was a dungeon, and half a theatre life was divided between the misery of chains, and the madness of a Bacchanalian revel. And the punishment was as impartial as the criminality. If the people perished by famine or the sword, the monarch went down headless to the tomb. For fifty years, the throne was but a speedier passage to a felon's grave.

"The reign of Commodus," says the historian, "was the signal of a revolution, to this day felt among the nations of the earth'." Then began the supremacy of the dagger. The tyrant, after twelve years of bloodshed, was stabbed in his palace. His successor, Pertinax, after a reign of three months, was slain by his guards. The profligate sale of the empire to Julian followed. Three candidates for the diadem took the field against him, and against each other, at the head of the British, Syrian, and Pannonian legions. Julian was beheaded, after a reign of two months; two of the candidates were defeated in pitched battles, and beheaded; Caracalla, the son and

1 Gibbon, vol. i.

successor of the third, assassinated his brother Geta, put 20,000 Romans to death, under pretence of conspiracies to avenge the fratricide; and then, like his predecessors, died by the dagger. Heliogabalus, who followed him to the throne, followed him to the grave, by the swords of the Prætorians. Alexander Severus, his successor, was cut to pieces by a military insurrection.

While such were the shocks of the highest station of human existence, what must be the ravage of private life? While diadems were tossed from hand to hand by a soldiery or a rabble, what must be the spoil of humbler distinctions? While the palace of the Cæsars was the seat of desolation, what must be the misery of the cottage-what the hideous havoc of the provinces through which those vast armies, contemptuous of all rights but the sword, and proud of their faculty of giving thrones away, rushed to encounter each other? Every struggle enfeebled the strength of the empire; victory or defeat was alike national ruin. Every blow, from whatever side it came, alike clave away some portion of the old golden armour of the empire; until, at last, the form stood naked, and the fatal discovery was made by the barbarians, that time had wrought its work even upon the colossal frame of the conqueror of the world.

Yet a still wilder era was at hand. From the middle of the third century, the confusion sud

denly deepened. As if some new spirit of pesti

lence had been subtilized from the universal corruption, the empire was suddenly thrown into a violence of moral disorder that threatened instant dissolution; the countenance of public life unaccountably blackened; all government was anarchy; all power was frenzy; all ambition was perfidy, bloodshed, and rapine. But the direct instrument of the infliction, the tempest in which were combined all the elements of ruin, the “torti fulminis iras," the whirlwind, the hail, and the fire, was war.

The old frontier contests had passed away; the struggle was now within the bosom of the empire. As if another Alecto had put the trumpet to her lips, every province burst out into insurrection; every legion looked upon itself as the arbiter of the throne. The Roman world was filled with rivals for supremacy; illustrious, obscure, warlike, timid, men of every rank, and every order of mind; but all alike committed in one great discordant league for the desolation of Roman grandeur. Maximin, the usurper of the throne of Severus, first let loose the sword against the senate and people; he fell by the dagger. All thenceforth was indiscriminate rebellion. Six imperial rivals rose within as many months, and perished; nineteen usurpers, at the head of armies, appeared at once in the field; " and the election of those precarious emperors, their power,