was still prevailing to a very great extent. The principal cities of
Greece were devastated by the Goths, who, recently converted to Arianism,
and having no taste for arts, destroyed all the temples, statues, and
other pagan monuments, with which they met. Athens escaped the fury of the
invaders, but the celebrated temple of Eleusis, whose mysteries continued
in full vigour in spite of all the laws which had been published against
polytheism, was destroyed, whilst its priests either perished or fled.
This catastrophe was so much felt by the adherents of the ancient worship
in Greece, that many of them are said to have committed suicide from
grief. "Since the defeat of Cheronea, and the capture of Corinth, the
Greek nationality had never experienced a severer blow than the
destruction of its temples and of its gods by Alaric," says an eminent
German writer of our day.(37) It was, indeed, a mortal blow to a religion
which maintained its sway by acting upon the senses and the imagination,
as well as upon the feelings of national pride or vanity, because it
destroyed all the means by which such feelings were produced. Alaric and
his Goths seem to have been destined by Providence to precipitate the fall
of Paganism at Rome, as well as in Greece, because the capture and sack of
the eternal city by these barbarians, in 410, accelerated the ruin of its
ancient worship more than all the laws proclaimed against it by the
Christian emperors. The particulars of this terrible catastrophe have been
amply described by Gibbon, and I shall only observe, that though
Christians had suffered on that occasion as much as Pagans, the worship of
the latter was struck at the very root of its existence by the complete
ruin of the Roman aristocracy, who, although frequently indifferent about
the tenets of the national polytheism, supported it with all their
influence as a political institution, which could not be abolished without
injuring the most vital interests of their order.(38) The decline of
Paganism from that time was very rapid. It is true that we have sufficient
historical evidence to show that pagan temples were still to be found at
Rome after its sack by the Goths, and that many Pagans were employed, in
the Western as well as in the Eastern empires, in some of the most
important offices of the state; but their number was fast disappearing,
and the exercise of their religion was generally confined to the domestic
hearth, to the worship of