Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE SECOND AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.241of privileges; the extreme north and utmost southacknowledge alike the unsparing zeal and majesticpresence of their ruler. At that moment Rome * isstill Roman. While the Augustan discipline stillanimates her legions, the sense of the subordinationof the military power to the civil spiritis not wholly lost; her proconspraefects have passed out of those plundering mag-,tes, who replenished in the tyranny of aor two from a drained province the treasures theyhad squandered in a life of corruption at Rome,to the orderly and yet dignified magistrates accountableto the Republic's life-president2 for thegated power. Perhaps the world hadnever yet seen anything at once so great and sobeneficent as the government of Hadrian. Butone thing was wanting to the many-tongued "andmany - tempered peoples ruled by him, that theyshould of their own will accept the worship ofone God, and so the matchless empire receive theonly true principle of coherence and permanencein the common possession of one religion. Andthe thoughtful student of history can hardly restrainhimself from indulging his fancy as to whatmiht then have been the result and into howgreat a structure provnces worthy of being kingdomsmight then have grown by the process 'of a2 Champagny remarks, that the emperors were never in the mind ofthe Romans sovereigns in the modern acceptation of the word, but life-presidents with absolute power.II.R