chamber must breathe the odor of flowers, even rare flowers ; our table must flow with the most fragrant and costly ointment, so that we become perfectly effeminate. Slaves must stand ready, richly adorned and in order, with waving, maidenlike hair, and faces shorn perfectly smooth, more adorned through- out than is good for lascivious eyes ; some, to hold cups both delicately and firmly with the tips of their fingers, others, to fan fresh air upon the head. Our table must bend under the ' Ammianus Marcellinus gives the most graphic account of the extravagant and tasteless luxury of the Roman aristocracy in the fourth century ; which Gibbon has admirably translated and explained in his 31st chapter. - Homil. in Matt. 63, § 4 (torn. vii. p. 533), comp. Hom. in 1 Cor. 21, § 6, and many other places in his sermons. Comp. Neander's Chrysostomus, i. p. 10 sqq. ; and Is. Taylor's Anc. Christianity, vol. ii., supplement, p. xxx. sqq. 128 THIKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. load of dislies, wliile all the kingdoms of nature, air, water, and earth, furnish copious contributions, and there must be almost no room for the artificial products of cook and baker. . . . The poor man is content with water ; but we fill our goblets with wine to dninkenness, nay, immeasurably beyond it. We refuse one wine, another we pronounce excellent when well flavored, over a third we institute philosophical discus- sions ; nay, we count it a pity, if he does not, as a king, add to the domestic wine a foreign also." ' Still more unfavorable are the pictures which, a half century later, the Gallic presby- ter, Salvianus, draws of the general moral condition of the Christians in the Roman empire.'^ It is true, these earnest protests against degeneracy them- selves, as well as the honor in which monasticism and ascetic contempt of tlie world were universally held, attest the exist- ence of a better spirit. But the uncontrollable progress of avarice, prodigality, voluptuousness, theatre going, intemper- ance, lewdness, in short, of all the heathen vices, which Chris- tianity had come to eradicate, still carried the Roman empire and people with I'apid strides toward dissolution, and gave it at last into the hands of the rude, but simple and morally vigorous barbarians. When the Christians were awakened by the crashings of the falling empire, and anxiously asked why Grod permitted it, Salvian, the Jeremiah of his time, answered : " Think of your vileness and your crimes, and see whether you are worthy of the divine protection." ' Nothing but the divine judgment of destruction upon this nominally Christian, but essentially heathen world, could open the way for the moral regeneration of society. There must be new, fresh nations, if the Christian civilization prepared in the old Roman empire was to take firm root and bear ripe fruit. § 24. Byzantine Court Christianity. The unnatural confusion of Christianity with the world culminated in the imperial court