s
must have lost the very conception of religion. Not only virtue, but
the very belief in any source of virtue, must have been utterly
extirpated in them. When Herod spoke, the people said it was the voice
of God; and he was smitten with worms because he gave not God the
glory. And surely the superhuman wickedness of the Caesars may be
regarded as a punishment, equally significant, of the fearful
blasphemy of the worshipped and the worshippers.

No wonder that the shores of Baiae now present a picture of the saddest
desolation. Where man sins, there man suffers. The relation between
human crime and the barren wilderness is still as inflexibly
maintained as at the first. Until all recollection of the iniquities
of the place has passed away it is fitting that these silent shores
should remain the desert that they are. We should not wish the old
voluptuous magnificence revived; and these myrtle bowers can never
more regain the charm of virgin solitudes untainted by man. Italy,
like Palestine, has thus an accursed spot in its fairest region--a
visible monument to all ages, of the great truth that the tidal wave
of retribution will inevitably overwhelm every nation that forgets the
eternal distinctions of right and wrong.

St. Paul was a man of keen sensibilities and strong imagination. He
must therefore at Puteoli have been deeply impressed at once with the
loveliness of nature and the wickedness of man. The contrast would
present itself to him in a very painful manner. As at Athens--where
his spirit was moved within him when he saw the city wholly given up
to idolatry--so here he must have had that noble indignation against
the iniquities of the place--the outrages committed on the laws of
God, and the dishonour done to the nature of man made in the Divine
image--to which David and Jeremiah, and all the loftiest spirits of
mankind, have given such stern and yet patriotic utterance. What
others were callous to, filled him with keen shame and sorrow. He who
could have wished that himself were accursed from Christ for his
brethren, his kinsmen according to the flesh, must have had a profound
pity for these wretched victims of profligacy, who were looking in
their ignorance for salvation to a brutal mortal worse than
themselves,--"the son of perdition, sitting in the temple of God,
showing that he was God." And to this feeling of indignation and
sorrow, because of the wickedness of the place, must have been added a
feeling