e hopes and fears that his
presence inspired; and the arbitrary exile of Symmachus was a recent
admonition, that it might be dangerous to oppose the wishes of the
monarch. On a regular division of the senate, Jupiter was condemned
and degraded by the sense of a very large majority; and it is rather
surprising, that any members should be found bold enough to declare, by
their speeches and votes, that they were still attached to the interest
of an abdicated deity. The hasty conversion of the senate must be
attributed either to supernatural or to sordid motives; and many of
these reluctant proselytes betrayed, on every favorable occasion, their
secret disposition to throw aside the mask of odious dissimulation.
But they were gradually fixed in the new religion, as the cause of
the ancient became more hopeless; they yielded to the authority of the
emperor, to the fashion of the times, and to the entreaties of their
wives and children, who were instigated and governed by the clergy of
Rome and the monks of the East. The edifying example of the Anician
family was soon imitated by the rest of the nobility: the Bassi,
the Paullini, the Gracchi, embraced the Christian religion; and "the
luminaries of the world, the venerable assembly of Catos (such are the
high-flown expressions of Prudentius) were impatient to strip themselves
of their pontifical garment; to cast the skin of the old serpent; to
assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence, and to humble the pride
of the consular fasces before tombs of the martyrs." The citizens, who
subsisted by their own industry, and the populace, who were supported by
the public liberality, filled the churches of the Lateran, and Vatican,
with an incessant throng of devout proselytes. The decrees of the
senate, which proscribed the worship of idols, were ratified by the
general consent of the Romans; the splendor of the Capitol was defaced,
and the solitary temples were abandoned to ruin and contempt. Rome
submitted to the yoke of the Gospel; and the vanquished provinces had
not yet lost their reverence for the name and authority of Rome.

Chapter XXVIII: Destruction Of Paganism.--Part II.

The filial piety of the emperors themselves engaged them to proceed,
with some caution and tenderness, in the reformation of the eternal
city. Those absolute monarchs acted with less regard to the prejudices
of the provincials. The pious labor which had been suspended near
twenty years since the d