The gods enjoined that games be exhibited in their honor to stay a physical pestilence; their pontiff prohibited the theatre from being constructed, to prevent a moral pestilence.If, then, there remains in you sufficient mental enlightenment to prefer the soul to the body, choose whom you will worship.Besides, though the pestilence was stayed, this was not because the voluptuous madness of stage-plays had taken possession of a warlike people hitherto accustomed only to tim games of the circus;but these astute and wicked spirits, foreseeing that in due course the pestilence would shortly cease, took occasion to infect, not the bodies, but the morals of their worshippers, with a far more serious disease.And in this pestilence these gods find great enjoyment, because it benighted the minds of men with so gross a darkness and dishonored them with so foul a deformity, that even quite recently (will posterity be able to credit it?)some of those who fled from the sack of Rome and found refuge in Carthage, were so infected with this disease, that day after day they seemed to contend with one another who should most madly run after the actors in the theatres.
CHAP.33.-- THAT THE OVERTHROW OF ROME HAS NOT CORRECTED THE VICES OFTHE ROMANS.
Oh infatuated men, what is this blindness, or rather madness, which possesses you? How is it that while, as we hear, even the eastern nations are bewailing your ruin, and while powerful states in the most remote parts of the earth are mourning your fall as a public calamity, ye yourselves should be crowding to the theatres, should be pouring into them and filling them; and, in short, be playing a madder part now than ever before? This was the foul plague-spot, this the wreck of virtue and honor that Scipio sought to preserve you from when he prohibited the construction of theatres; this was his reason for desiring that you might still have an enemy to fear, seeing as he did how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you.He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are in ruins.But the seductions of evil-minded devils had more influence with you than the precautions of prudent men.Hence the injuries you do, you will not permit to be imputed to you: but the injuries you suffer, you impute to Christianity.Deprayed by good fortune, and not chastened by adversity, what you desire in the restoration of a peaceful and secure state, is not the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but the impunity of your own vicious luxury.Scipio wished you to be hard pressed by an enemy, that you might not abandon yourselves to luxurious manners; but so abandoned are you, that not even when crushed by the enemy is your luxury repressed.
You have missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most wretched, and have remained most profligate.
CHAP.34.--OF GOD'S CLEMENCY IN MODERATINGTHE RUIN OF THE CITY.
And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you may be admonished to repent and reform your lives.It is He who has permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in the sacred places of the martyrs.
It is said that Romulus and Remus, in order to increase the population of the city they founded, opened a sanctuary in which every man might find asylum and absolution of all crime,--a remarkable foreshadowing of what has recently occurred in honor of Christ.The destroyers of Rome followed the example of its founders.