incompatible, and was not, in fact, incompatible with any
of those especial excellences which we so admire in the Greek character.

Among the Romans (that is, the early Romans of the republic), there was
a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose
business was to enquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to
punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only
once on this planet. There was never a nation before, and there has been
none since, with sufficient virtue to endure it. But the Roman morality
was not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It was
obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it,
for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for
itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it
submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the
old spirit endured. But as soon as that energy grew slack--when the
religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in,
and there was no more danger to face, and the world was at their feet,
all was swept away as before a whirlwind; there was no loveliness in
virtue to make it desired, and the Rome of the Caesars presents, in its
later ages, a picture of enormous sensuality, of the coarsest animal
desire, with means unlimited to gratify it. In Latin literature, as
little as in the Greek, is there any sense of the beauty of purity.
Moral essays on temperance we may find, and praise enough of the wise
man whose passions and whose appetites are trained into obedience to
reason. But this is no more than the philosophy of the old Roman life,
which got itself expressed in words when men were tired of the reality.
It involves no sense of sin. If sin could be indulged without weakening
self-command, or without hurting other people, Roman philosophy would
have nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy. Without speculating on
the _why_, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact,
pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe,
giving the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and
incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should
be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to,
its proper existence, a man like Plotinus took no especi