This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ...of the freeman I What a tremendous swinging away from the poles of the Roman mind! What a cataclysmic reversion of the currents of Roman habits, manners, customs I What a complete uprooting and reconstruction of the domestic and civil society of paganism, which had founded itself on the conception of the supremacy of the State and the cancellation of individual rights! The new principle of life was to enter into the corrupted body of Adam, raising it revivified from the grave in which its sin had buried it; and that body, so long the abode of all uncleanness and foulness, in the new order becomes the temple of the Holy Ghost, the home of sanctity and purity. In the new teaching man is not a little mucus and to-morrow a mummy or ashes, but a rational soul with an immortal destiny before it, whose resurrected body was to participate in that incorruptible life hereafter. God was not an impersonal world soul, a mere principle of vitality in which all things shared and into which all were again merged, without distinction at death, but the Personal, Infinite and Eternal Creator and Governor of the universe, and the universe the creature of the power of His Word, who brought forth all things from nothing. Here was a change by the whole periphery of being from the gross pantheism of heathenism. Pagan man had lost the idea of personality, both of divine and human personality, and with this ignorance followed the extinction of the notion of responsibility. All moral action had ultimately resolved itself into the barren mystery of fate--the inexorable power which drove all things blindly to their term. Here was no room for freedom and, therefore, no room for responsibility. Stoicism and epicureanism both reflected or rather concentrated this impotency of...