were crying that God had given up the
world; that Christ had deserted his Church, and delivered over Christians
to the cruelties of heathen and Arian barbarians. The many bad were
openly blaspheming, throwing off in despair all faith, all bonds of
religion, all common decency, and crying, Let us eat and drink, for to-
morrow we die. Salvian answers them like an old Hebrew prophet: 'The
Lord's arm is not shortened. The Lord's eyes are not closed. The Lord
is still as near as ever. He is governing the world as He has always
governed it: by the everlasting moral laws, by which the wages of sin are
death. Your iniquities have withheld good things from you. You have
earned exactly what God has paid you. Yourselves are your own
punishment. You have been wicked men, and therefore weak men; your own
vices, and not the Goths, have been your true conquerors.' As I said in
my inaugural lecture--that is after all the true theory of history. Men
may forget it in piping times of peace. God grant that in the dark hour
of adversity, God may always raise up to them a prophet, like good old
Salvian, to preach to them once again the everlasting judgments of God;
and teach them that not faulty constitutions, faulty laws, faulty
circumstances of any kind, but the faults of their own hearts and lives,
are the causes of their misery.

M. Guizot, in his elaborate work on the History of Civilization in
France, has a few curious pages, on the causes of the decline of civil
society in Roman Gaul, and its consequent weakness and ruin. He tells
you how the Senators or Clarissimi did not constitute a true aristocracy,
able to lead and protect the people, being at the mercy of the Emperor,
and nominated and removed at his pleasure. How the Curiales, or wealthy
middle class, who were bound by law to fulfil all the municipal offices,
and were responsible for the collection of the revenue, found their
responsibilities so great, that they by every trick in their power,
avoided office. How, as M. Guizot well puts it, the central despotism of
Rome stript the Curiales of all they earned, to pay its own functionaries
and soldiers; and gave them the power of appointing magistrates, who were
only after all the imperial agents of that despotism, for whose sake they
robbed their fellow-citizens. How the plebs, comprising the small
tradesmen and free artizans, were utterly unable to assert their own
opinions or rights. How the slave population, th