surrounded. It
would seem almost impossible for the Christian graces to grow in such a
foetid atmosphere. Like the snow-white lily springing in virgin purity
from the muddy ooze, they are more lovely by contrast with the
surrounding pollutions. Like flowers that deck a sepulchre, breathing
their fragrance amid scenes of corruption and death, are these holy
characters, fragrant with the breath of heaven amid the social
rottenness and moral death of their foul environment.

It is difficult to imagine, and impossible to portray, the abominable
pollutions of the times. "Society," says Gibbon, "was a rotten, aimless
chaos of sensuality." It was a boiling Acheron of seething passions,
unhallowed lusts, and tiger thirst for blood, such as never provoked
the wrath of Heaven since God drowned the world with water, or destroyed
the Cities of the Plain by fire. Only those who have visited the secret
museum of Naples, or that house which no woman may enter at Pompeii, and
whose paintings no pen may describe; or, who are familiar with the
scathing denunciations of popular vices by the Roman satirists and
moralists and by the Christian Fathers, can conceive the appalling
depravity of the age and nation. St. Paul, in his epistle to the Church
among this very people, hints at some features of their exceeding
wickedness. It was to shame even to speak of the things which were done
by them, but which gifted poets employed their wit to celebrate. A
brutalized monster was deified as God, received divine homage,[61] and
beheld all the world at his feet, and the nations trembled at his nod,
while the multitude wallowed in a sty of sensuality.

Christianity was to be the new Hercules to cleanse this worse than
Augean pollution. The pure morals and holy lives of the believers were a
perpetual testimony against abounding iniquity, and a living proof of
the regenerating power and transforming grace of God. For they
themselves, as one of their apologists asserts, "had been reclaimed
from ten thousand vices;" and the Apostle, describing some of the vilest
characters, exclaims, "such were some of you, but ye are washed, ye are
sanctified." They recoiled with the utmost abhorrence from the
pollutions of the age, and became indeed "the salt of the earth," the
sole moral antiseptic to prevent the total disintegration of society.

Thus amid idolatrous usages and unspeakable moral degradation the
Christians lived, a holy nation, a peculiar people. "We