A REVIEW OF SUNDAY LEGISLATION IN CENTURY NINETEEN. NO. 14.
DIGRESSION ON THE PRINCIPLES OF ROME (CONTINUED).
[In our last issue the writer showed that the Papacy was based on the paganism of the Roman Empire. It was the old paganism modified by Christianity, with the changed nomenclature. He also showed from Scripture and history just what the principles of Rome were. In this number the subject is continued.]
THE Scripture says of the Roman people that they are “the children of robbers” or, Revised Version, “violence.” Mithridates records concerning “their foundation and origin,” “whatever they have, they have from violence.” There is no dissonance between these two. So much for their origin, now to their national life and policy. Says the historian:—
The Romans invaded, upon different pretenses, those great potentates, who divided Europe and Asia. And how haughtily did they treat them, even before they had conquered! A powerful king, confined within a narrow circle by a private man of Rome, was obliged to make his answer before he quitted it: how imperious was this! But then, how did they treat vanquished kings?—They command them to deliver up their children, and the heirs to their crown, as hostages and pledges of their fidelity and good behavior; oblige them to lay down their arms; forbid them to declare war, or conclude any alliance, without first obtaining their leave; banish them to the other side of the mountains; and leave them, in strictness of speech, only an empty title, and a vain shadow of royalty, divested of all its rights and advantages.
We cannot doubt but that Providence had decreed to the Romans the sovereignty of the world, and the Scriptures had prophesied their future grandeur; but they were strangers to those divine oracles; and besides, the bare prediction of their conquests was no justification of their conduct. Although it be difficult to affirm, and still more to prove, that this people had, from their first rise, formed a plan, in order to conquer and subject all nations, it cannot be denied but that if we examine their whole conduct attentively, it will appear as if they had a foreknowledge of this, and that a kind of instinct had determined them to conform to it in all things.
Be this as it will, we see, by the event, in what this so boasted lenity and moderation of the Romans terminated. Enemies to the liberties of all nations; having the utmost contempt for kings and monarchy; looking upon the whole universe as their prey, they grasped, with insatiable ambition, the conquest of the whole world; they seized indiscriminately all provinces and kingdoms, extended their empire over all nations; in a word, they described no other limit to their vast projects than those which deserts and seas made it impossible to pass.
The above is a picture in general terms of Rome's national policy. But the following quotation gives the facts just as they were, with the philosophy of those facts interwoven:—
The relations she [Rome] maintained with surrounding communities had been such that she could not trust to them. Her enemy [Carthage] found allies in many of the Greek towns in the south of Italy. It is enough for us to look at the result of that conflict in the treaty that closed it. Carthage had to give up all her ships of war except ten triremes, to bind herself to enter into no war without the consent of the Roman people, and to pay a war fine of two millions of pounds. Rome now entered on the great scale, on the policy of disorganizing States for the purpose of weakening them.
Under a pretext of an invitation from the Athenians to protect them from the king of Macedon, the ambitious republic secured a footing in Greece, the principle developed in the invasion of Africa, of making war maintain war, being again resorted to. There may have been truth in the Roman accusation that the intrigues of Hannibal with Antiochus, king of Syria, occasioned the conflict between Rome and that monarch. In issue the prodigious event in the material aggrandizement of Rome—it was the cession of all his possessions in Europe and those of Asia, north of Mt. Taurus, with a war fine of three millions of pounds. . . . The resistance of Perces, king of Macedon, could not restore independence to Greece; it ended in the annexation of that country, Epirus and Illyricum. The results of this war were to the last degree pernicious to the victors and to the vanquished; the moral greatness of the former is truly affirmed to have disappeared, and the social ruin of the latter was so complete that for long marriage was replaced by concubinage. THE POLICY AND PRACTICES OF ROME NOW LITERALLY BECAME INFERNAL: she forced a quarrel upon her old antagonist, Carthage, and the third Punic war resulted in the utter destruction of that city.
Simultaneously her oppressions in Greece provoked revolt, which was ended by the sack and burning of Corinth, Thebes, Chalcis, and the transference of the plundered statues, paintings, and works of art to Italy. There was nothing now in the way of the conquest of Spain except the valor of its inhabitants. After the assassination of Viriatus, procured by the Consul Cæpio, and the horrible siege of Numantia, that country was annexed as a province.
Next we see the gigantic republic extending itself over the richest parts of Asia Minor, through the insane request of Attalus, king of Pergamus. The wealth of Africa, Spain, Greece, and Asia was now concentrating in Italy, and the capital was becoming absolutely demoralized. In vain the Gracchi attempted to apply a remedy. The Roman aristocracy was intoxicated, insatiate, irresistible. The middle class was gone; there was nothing but profligate nobles and a diabolical populace.
What can be added to this?—Nothing save the words of Rollin, already quoted: “Although it be difficult to affirm, and still more to prove, that this people had, from their first rise, formed a plan in order to conquer and subject all nations,” they could not have gone about it more systematically and more diabolically than they did. The majority of their wars were altogether uncalled for; they were the result of the policy of SELF-EXALTATION. The Romans were truly “enemies to the liberty of all nations.” And their treatment of those they conquered was positively brutal. Listen again to Draper:—
The republic, during its whole career, illustrates the observation that the system on which it was founded included no conception of the actual relations of man. It dealt with him as a THING, not as a being endowed with inalienable rights. Recognizing power as its only measure of value, it could never accept the principle of the equality of all men in the eye of the law. The subjugation of Sicily, Africa, Greece, was quickly followed by the depopulation of those countries, as Livy, Plutarch, Strabo, and Polybius test. Can there be a more fearful instance than the conduct of Paulus Æmilius, who, at the conquest of Epirus, murdered or carried into slavery 150,000 persons? At the taking of Thebes whole families were thus disposed of, and these not of the lower, but of the respectable kind, of whom it has been significantly said that they were transported into Italy to be MELTED DOWN. In Italy itself the consumption of life was so great that there was no possibility of the slaves by birth meeting the requirement, and the supply of others by war became necessary.
. . . To such a degree had this system been developed that slave labor was actually cheaper than animal labor, and as a consequence much of the work that we perform by cattle was then done by men. The class of independent hirelings, which should have constituted the chief strength of the country, disappeared, labor itself becoming so ignoble that the poor citizen could not be an artisan, but must remain a pauper—a sturdy beggar, expecting from the State bread and amusements.
Rome never considered man as an individual, but only as a thing. Her way to political greatness was pursued utterly regardless of human suffering. If advantages accrued to the conquered under her dominion, they arose altogether from incident, and never from her purposed intent. She was no self-conscious, deliberate civilizer. Conquest and rapine, the uniform aim of her actions, never permitted her utmost intellectual development to comprehend the equal rights of all men in the eye of the law. Unpitying in her stern policy, few were the occasions when, for high state reasons, she stayed her uplifted hand. She might in the wantonness of her power stoop to mercy, she never rose to benevolence.295All this tells the fundamental principles and the undeviating policy of Rome. To her, in the words of one of her most illustrious children, man was naught but “mud mixed with blood.” Wanton cruelty of the most uncalled for and diabolical kind has marked every step of her pathway to territorial greatness, from that “place of refuge” for “vagabonds” on the Palatine Hill, to the zenith of her glory, when, with stately but with proud and heartless step, she trod upon mankind from the Rhine and the Danube to Mount Atlas, and the Atlantic to the Euphrates River.
To the majority of us Pagan Rome is a phantom of the past. Her heroes occupy the shadowy corners of our memories, no longer as men, but as Latin “nominatives governing a verb, or ablatives of means or instrument.”
But the principles of Pagan Rome still LIVE. They are still perpetuated amongst us, not by Tarquin and Scipio, but by Leo XIII. and Satolli. The members of the Roman hierarchy are the counterpart to the old Roman generals; the Jesuits, the unruly but much to be dreaded legions. At present they come to us with specious “pretexts” of friendship; but this is only that they may secure a “footing” in our land. She has won the American people over to her ideas, and is even now with one hand rocking them to a fearful slumber in the papal cradle, while with the other she administers that deadly potion,—“the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” Soon, like Delilah, she will have them lulled to sleep; nay, we may almost say she has already shorn them of the locks of their strength that her minions may put out their eyes and bind them with fetters of brass.
Thank God, in this most awful time the God of heaven will hear the cry of the righteous, and deliver them out of the net of the fowler. “Give me,” said Archimedes, “a point without the world, and I will lift it from its poles.” Jesus Christ is that point. From his seat “within the veil” he anchors his power into the souls of men, lifting them from their “double pivot of selfishness and sensuality,” and making them revolve upon a “new axis of righteousness and peace.” This work will soon be completed in the hearts of all who will be saved, and then he will “come quickly” and bring his “reward” with him. “Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus.”