The Age and Christianity Author:Robert Vaughan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I which it is nowhere. The future, once so thickly peopled with its terrors, has become a blank; and licence is taken to say—and to do according to the say—Le... more »t us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Hence, in the ancient world, the priesthood of philosophy was, to a large extent, ihe priesthood of atheism—open or disguised. Ethical systems were discussed; many just maxims were promulgated; but the evil proved ere long to be more potent than the good—theism tottered everywhere to its fall, and all that should have given strength to the body-politic became powerless. This is the chain of evils always incident to a high state of civilization, when existing apart from the conservative influence of a revealed standard of truth and duty. Even in such countries as Egypt and Asia, where speculation was much less free than in Greece and Rome, we see confirmation enough of this statement. Indeed, nowhere else has the course of nations been so uniformly one narrow round from barbarism to civilization, and from civilization to corruptness and decay. In the East, civilization has soon run up into a gorgeous magnificence; but in the train of this splendour have come—and with a progress not less rapid—sensualism, impiety, and the hand-writing upon the wall! It is to be marked, then, as a lesson of grave import, that in all the ancient nations, civilization proved a trust much too weighty to be placedin the hands to which it was committed. To wield so mighty an instrument with the requisite wisdom, for any long interval, demanded a higher cultivation of the moral nature of man than had been then realized. Religion did very little in this way for its votaries: while philosophy, which could affect the condition of the people only indirectly and remotely, never failed in the end to do more...« less