wild Bacchic worship that produced the secret
orgies on the Aventine, the discovery of which led to a religious
persecution and the execution of thousands of persons on religious
grounds; then the worship of the Egyptian deities, brought over to Rome
in a new fit of belief, and at the same time, or soon afterwards, the
mysterious adoration of the Persian Mithras, a gross and ignorant form
of mysticism which, nevertheless, took hold of the people, at a time
when other religions were almost reduced to a matter of form.

Then, as all these many faiths lost vitality, Christianity arose, the
terribly simple and earnest Christianity of the early centuries, sown
first under the Caesars, in Rome's secure days, developing to a power
when Rome was left to herself by the transference of the Empire to the
East, culminating for the first time in the crowning of Charlemagne,
again in the Crusades, sinking under the revival of mythology and
Hellenism during the Renascence, rising again, by slow degrees, to the
extreme level of devotion under Pius the Ninth and the French
protectorate, sinking suddenly with the movement of Italian unity, and
the coming of the Italians in 1870, then rising again, as we see it now,
with undying energy, under Leo the Thirteenth, and showing itself in the
building of new churches, in the magnificent restoration of old ones,
and in the vast second growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which are
once more turning Rome into a clerical city, now that she is again at
peace with herself, under a constitutional monarchy, but threatened only
too plainly by an impending anarchic revolution. It would be hard to
find in the history of any other city a parallel to such periodical
recurrences of religious domination. Nor, in times when belief has been
at its lowest ebb, have outward religious practices anywhere continued
to hold so important a place in men's lives as they have always held in
Rome. Of all Rome's mad tyrants, Elagabalus alone dared to break into
the temple of Vesta and carry out the sacred Palladium. During more than
eleven hundred years, six Vestal Virgins guarded the sacred fire and the
Holy Things of Rome, in peace and war, through kingdom, republic,
revolution and empire. For fifteen hundred years since then, the bones
of Saint Peter have been respected by the Emperors, by Goths, by Kings,
revolutions and short-lived republics.

[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]

IV