Vergilius: A Tale of the Coming of Christ

stood looking into the dark va

if it were not better for a man had he never been born-deeming life a misfortune and extinction the only happiness; poets singing no more of "pleasantries and trifles," but seeking favor with poor obscenities. Soon they were even to celebrate the virtue of harlots, the integrity of thieves, the tenderness of murderers, the justice of oppression. Le

agination of the ignorant and the jests of the learned. In a growing patriciate home had become a weariness, marriage a form, children a trouble, and the decline of motherhood an alarming fact. Augustus tried the remedy of legislation. Henceforth marriage became a duty to the state. As between men and women, things were near a turning-point. Woman cannot long endure scorn nor the absence of veneration. A law older than the tablets of ston

d who practised the four virtues of honor, bravery, wisdom, and temperance. In rural Latium, rich and poor clu

hair now turning gray. He flung his lightning with unerring aim across the great purple sea into Arabia, Africa, and Spain, and northward to the German Ocean and eastward to the land of the Goths. The gen

. Sayings of certain learned men came out of Judea into the land of lost hope. They told of the king of promise-that he would bring to men the

en were sad, fearful, a

they were wont to ask

tudied the philosophers

and were u

irmishers were busy-patrician and plebeian, master and slave, oppressor and oppressed. Soon all were to see the line o

gods and men, and who, being weary of the