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The Roman nation was one of the noblest that the world has seen. We may judge from the fact of St. Paul's twice claiming his Roman citizenship, and that at a time when a luxurious Greek could purchase his freedom. We may conceive what it had been once, when even the faint lustre of its earlier dignity could inspire a foreigner, and that foreigner a Jew, and that Jew a Christian, with such respect. At the outset, then, we have a rare and high-minded people and their life, to think of.

I. THE PUBLIC LIFE OF ROME.

1. The spirit of its religion — the very word means obligation, a binding power. Very different from the corresponding Greek expression, which implies worship by a sensuous ceremonial (threskeia). The Roman began from the idea of duty. The fabulous early history of Rome preserves the spirit of the old life when it does not preserve the facts. Accordingly, the tradition taught that the building of Rome was done in obedience to the intimations of the will of Heaven. Its first great legislator (Numa) is represented as giving laws after secret communion with the superhuman. It was the belief of Roman writers that the early faith taught access to God only through the mind: that therefore no images were found in earliest Rome. War itself was a religious act, solemnly declared by a minister of religion casting a spear into the enemy's territory. Nay, we even find something in spirit resembling the Jewish sabbath: the command that during the rites of religion no work should go on, but that men should devoutly contemplate God.

2. This resulted in government. Duty, and therefore law on earth, as a copy of the will of Heaven. Beauty was not the object of the Roman contemplation, nor worship; nor was harmony. Hence, when Greece was reduced to a Roman province, in , the Roman soldiers took the noblest specimens of Grecian painting and converted them into gambling tables. You may distinguish the difference of the two characters from the relies which they have left behind them. The Greek produced a statue or a temple, the expression of a sentiment. The Roman, dealing with the practical, has left behind him works of public usefulness: roads, aqueducts, bridges, drains, and, above all, that system of law which has so largely entered into modern jurisprudence.

3. In accordance with this, it is a characteristic fact that we find the institutions of Rome referred to inspiration. Turning to Scripture, whenever the Roman comes prominently forward, we always find him the instrument of public rule and order. Pilate has no idea of condemning unjustly: "Why, what evil hath He done?" But he yields at the mention of the source of law, the emperor. The Apostle Paul appeals to Caesar, and Festus respects the appeal. The tumult at Ephesus is stilled by a hint of Roman interference. When the angry mob was about to destroy Paul, Claudius Lysias comes "with an army, and rescues him." It was always the same thing. The Roman seems almost to have existed to exhibit on earth a copy of the Divine order of the universe, the law of the heavenly hierarchies.

II. PRIVATE LIFE.

1. The sanctity of domestic ties.

(1)Very touching are the anecdotes — that, e.g., of the noble matron, who felt, all spotless as she was, life dishonoured, and died by her own hand. The sacredness of home was expressed strongly by the ides of two guardian deities (Lares and Penates) who watched over it. There was no battle cry that came so to the Roman's heart as that, "For the altar and the hearth." The whole fabric of the Commonwealth rose out of the family. First the family, then the clan, then the tribe, lastly the nation.

(2) Very different is it in the East. A nation there is a collection of units, held together by a government. When the chief is slain, the nation is in anarchy — the family does not exist. Polygamy and infanticide, the bane of domestic life, are the destruction too of national existence.

(3) There is a solemn lesson in this. Moral decay in the family is the invariable prelude to public corruption. The man whom you cannot admit into your family cannot be a pure statesman. A nation stands or falls with the sanctity of its domestic ties. Rome mixed with Greece, and learned her morals. The Goth was at her gates; but she fell not till she was corrupted and tainted at the heart.

(4) We will bless God for our English homes. Partly the result of our religion. Partly the result of the climate which God has given us, so that darkness, making life more necessarily spent within doors, is domestic. When England shall learn domestic maxims from strangers, as Rome from Greece, her ruin is accomplished.

2. Let us break up this private life into particulars.

(1) We find manly courage. Courage, manhood, virtue, were one word. Among the degenerate descendants of the Romans virtue no longer means manhood: it is simply dilettantism. This courage was not merely animal daring. Like everything Roman, it was connected with religion. The Roman legions subdued the world, not by their discipline, strength, or brute daring, but by their moral force. A nation whose heroes could thrust their hand into the flame, or come from captivity and advise their countrymen against peace, and then go back to torture and death, or devote themselves by solemn self-sacrifice (like the Decii), could bid sublime defiance to pain and count dishonour the only evil. The world must bow before such men; for unconsciously here was a form of the spirit of the Cross: self-surrender, unconquerable fidelity to duty, sacrifice for others.

(2) The honour of her women. There was a fire in Rome called Eternal, which was tended by the Vestals, and implied that the duration of Rome was co-extensive with the preservation of her purity of morals. The Roman was conspicuous for the virtues of this earth; but moral virtues are not religious graces. There are two classes of excellence, each of which is found at times disjoined from the other. Men of almost spotless earthly honour scarcely seem to know what reverence for things heavenly and devout aspirations towards God mean; and men who have the religious instinct yet fall in matters of common truth and honesty. Morality is not religion. Still, beware of talking contemptuously of "mere morality."

III. THE DECLINE OF ROMAN LIFE.

1. First came corruption of the moral character. The soul of the Roman, bent on this world's affairs, became secularised, then animalised, and so at last, when there was little left to do, pleasure became his aim. Then came ruin swiftly. When the emperors lived for their elaborately contrived life of luxury — when the Roman soldier left his country's battles to be fought by mercenaries — the doom of Rome was sealed. Lofty spirits rose to stem the tide of corruption and the death throes of Rome were long and terrible.

2. Scepticism and superstition went hand in hand. The lower classes sunk in a debased superstition — the educated classes, too intellectual to believe in it, and yet having nothing better to put in its stead. Or perhaps there was also a superstition which is only another name for scepticism: infidelity trembling at itself — shrinking from its own shadow. This is as true now. Men tremble at new theories, new views, the spread of infidelity; and they think to fortify themselves against these by multiplying the sanctities which they reverence. But it is not by shutting out inquiry and resenting every investigation as profane, that you can arrest the progress of infidelity. Faith, not superstition, is the remedy.

3. Religion degenerated into allegiance to the State. In Greece it ended in taste. In Rome it closed with the worship of the emperor, and the word "sacrament" meant an oath of allegiance. In the Christian Church it is also the oath of highest fidelity. "Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a living sacrifice." And in this contrast of the sacramental vows were perceptible the different tendencies of the two starting points of revealed religion and Roman. Judaism began from law or obligation to a holy Person. Roman religion began from obedience to a mere will. Judaism ended in Christianity; whose central principle is joyful surrender to One whose name is Love. The religion of Rome stiffened into Stoicism, or degenerated in public spirit.

4. The last step is the decline of religion into expediency. It is a trite and often quoted observation of a great Roman, that one minister of religion could scarcely meet another without a smile upon his countenance. And an instance of this, I believe, we have in the town clerk of Ephesus, who stilled the populace by an accommodation to their prejudices, much in the same way in which a nurse would soothe a passionate child. He was the friend of Paul, yet he assures the people that there could be no doubt that the image fell down from Jupiter — "great goddess Diana."

(F. W. Robertson, M. A.)

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KJV: I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise.

WEB: I am debtor both to Greeks and to foreigners, both to the wise and to the foolish.