ms of the republic,
the important question, Whether the worship of Jupiter, or that of
Christ, should be the religion of the Romans. [1811] The liberty of
suffrages, which he affected to allow, was destroyed by the 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. [19] 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, [20] 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." [21] 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; [22] the splendor of the Capitol was
defaced, and the solitary temples were abandoned to ruin and contempt.
[23] 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. [2311]

[Footnote 17: See Ambrose, (tom. ii. Epist. xvii. xviii. p. 825-833.)
The former of these epistles is a short ca