22. Such was the state of the world--such the condition of the Jews at the time of Messiah's birth; and surely that condition justified the pity and also the stern reproofs--nay, the severe rebukes administered, as we shall see, by the Son of God in the course of his ministry.
1. State of the World at Messiah's Birth.--The world had grown { 30} old, and the dotage of its paganism was marked by hideous excesses. Atheism in belief was followed, as among all nations it has always been, by degradation of morals, iniquity seemed to have run its course to the very farthest goal. Philosophy had abrogated its boasted functions except for the favored few. Crime was universal, and there was no known remedy for the horror and ruin which it was causing in a thousand hearts. Remorse itself seemed to be exhausted, so that men were past feeling. There was a callosity of heart, a petrifying of the moral sense, which even those who suffered from it felt to be abnormal and portentous. Even the heathen world felt that "the fullness of the time" had come.--Canon Farrar.
2. Policy of Rome in Respect to Religion.--The policy of the emperors and the senate, so far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And this toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. * * * Avarice and taste very frequently despoiled the vanquished nations of the elegant statues of their gods and the rich ornaments of their temples; but in the exercise of the religion which they derived from their ancestors, they uniformly experienced the indulgence, and even protection of the Roman conquerors. The province of Gaul seems, and indeed only seems, an exception to this universal toleration. Under the specious pretext of abolishing human sacrifices, the emperors Tiberius and Claudius suppressed the dangerous power of the Druids; but the priests themselves, their gods and their altars, subsisted in peaceful obscurity till the final fall of paganism. * * * Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.--Gibbon.