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Excerpt: ...In that age when, like later eloquent critics, Ennius said that he did not believe that the gods thought of human beings, for if the gods concerned themselves about the human race the good would prosper and the bad suffer, the courtesan was kept for pleasure and the wife for domestic slavery. In that happy age of unbelief, when Menander sung the gods do not care for men, the homes were, according to Juvenal, broken up before the nuptial garland faded ; and according to Tertullian, they married only to be divorced. Friends exchanged wives; infanticide and other hellish crimes were common. This is what that spirit, in its purity, did for the home, when there was no Bible to read at its hearthstone and no New Testament to put into the hands of young lovers departing to make a new rooftree. Labor will some day be too liberal to give up its Bible. In that age, when God was dead ; in that age, when the gods had abdicated ; they said, the mechanic's occupation is degrading. A workshop is incompatible with anything noble. The curse of slavery had blotted the name of labor, and they agreed that a purchased laborer is better than a hired one, and thousands of prison-like dwellings rose to conceal the myriads of slaves. In that age Nero, who had the same opinion about God which the vaunting spirit which calls itself liberal has today, had a golden house as large as a city, with colonnades a mile long, and within it a statue of Nero 120 feet high. That is what the theory of infidelity did for labor and the working man when it was on the throne. Do you wonder that from that day to this the carpenter's son of the Bible has been scoffed at by this infidelity? In that age, when the theories of infidelity ruled, the gladiators made wet with their blood the great enclosure of the arena. The women and timid girls of Rome gave lightly the sign of death. The crowd shook the building with applause as the palpitating body was dragged by a hook into the...

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9781153727013

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