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s you do--and love and glory in the yoke--this rule of such creatures as Varus, and others whom it were not hard to name? I know what you are--for I have been one of you. I have not been, nor am I now, hermit, as you may think, being a Christian. A Christian is a man of the world--a man of action and of suffering--not of rest and sleep. I have ever been abroad among men, both before I was a Christian and since; and I know what you are. You are of the same stamp as Varus! nay, start not, nor threaten with your eyes,--I fear you not. If you are not so, why, I say, is Varus there? You know that I speak the truth. The people of Rome are corrupt as their rulers! How should it be much otherwise? You are fed by the largesses of the Emperor, you have your two loaves a day and your pork, and you need not and so do not work. You have no employment but idleness, and idleness is not so much a vice itself as the prolific mother of all vices. When I was one of you, it was so; and so it is now. My father's labor was nothing; he was kept by the state. The Emperor was not more a man of pleasure than he, nor the princes, than I and Varus. Was that a school of virtue? When I left the service of the amphitheatre I joined the Legions. In the army I had work, and I had fighting, but my passions, in the early days of that service, raged like the sea; and during all the reign of Valerian's son there was no bridle upon them;--for I served under the general Carinus, and what Carinus was and is, most of you know. O the double horrors of those years! I was older, and yet worse and worse. God! I marvel that thou didst not interpose and strike me dead! But thy mercy spared me, and now the lowest, lowest hell shall not be mine.' Tears, forced by these recollections, flowed down his cheeks, and for a time he was speechless.
'Such, Romans, was I once. What am I now? I am a changed man--through and through. There is not a thought of my mind, nor a fibre of my body, what they were once. You may possibly think the change has been for the wor