If a faithful picture of society in ancient Greece or Rome were to be presented to view, it

is not easy to believe that even they who now most oppose the Bible could wish their

aims success. For this, at any rate, may be asserted, without fear of gainsaying, that no

other religion than that of the Bible has proved competent to control an advanced, or

even an advancing, state of civilisation. Every other bound has been successively

passed and submerged by the rising tide; how deep only the student of history knows.

Two things are here undeniable. In the case of heathenism every advance in civilisation

has marked a progressive lowering of public morality, the earlier stages of national life

always showing a far higher tone than the later. On the contrary, the religion of the Bible

(under the old as under the new dispensation) has increasingly raised, if not uniformly

the public morals, yet always the tone and standard of public morality; it has continued

to exhibit a standard never yet attained, and it has proved its power to control public

and social life, to influence and to mould it.

Strange as it may sound, it is strictly true that, beyond the boundaries of Israel, it would

be scarcely possible to speak with any propriety of family life, or even of the family, as

we understand these terms. It is significant, that the Roman historian Tacitus should

mark it as something special among the Jews  40--which they only shared with the

ancient barbarian Germans--that they regarded it as a crime to kill their offspring!

This is not the place to describe the exposure of children, or the various crimes by which

ancient Greece and Rome, in the days of their highest culture, sought to rid themselves

of what was regarded as superfluous population. Few of those who have learned to

admire classical antiquity have a full conception of any one phase in its social life --

whether of the position of woman, the relation of the sexes, slavery, the education of

children, their relation to their parents, or the state of public morality. Fewer still have

combined all these features into one picture, and that not merely as exhibited by the

lower orders, or even among the higher classes, but as fully owned and approved by

those whose names have descended in the admiration of ages as the thinkers, the sages,

the poets, the historians, and the statesmen of antiquity. Assuredly, St. Paul's

description of the ancient world in the first and second chapters of his Epistle to the

Romans must have appeared to those who lived in the midst of it as Divine even in its

tenderness, delicacy, and charity; the full picture under bright sunlight would have been

scarcely susceptible of exhibition. For such a world there was only one alternative--

either t he judgment of Sodom, or the mercy of the Gospel and the healing of the Cross.41

When we pass from the heathen world into the homes of Israel, even the excess of their

exclusiveness seems for the moment a relief. It is as if we turned from enervating,

withering, tropical heat into a darkened room, whose grateful coolness makes us for the

moment forget that its gloom is excessive, and cannot continue as the day declines. And

this shutting out of all from without, this exclusiveness, applied not only to what

concerned their religion, their social and family life, but also to their knowledge. In the

days of Christ the pious Jew had no other knowledge, neither sought nor cared for any

other--in fact, denounced it --than that of the law of God. At the outset, let it be

remembered that, in heathenism, theology, or rather mythology, had no influence

whatever on thinking or life --was literally submerged under their waves. To the pious