In these latter reforms, which simply
restrained the exorbitant salaries of a class dedicated to the public
pleasures, and unprofitable to the state, Marcus may have had no farther
view than that which is usually connected with sumptuary laws. But in the
restraints upon the gladiators, it is impossible to believe that his
highest purpose was not that of elevating human nature, and preparing the
way for still higher regulations. As little can it be believed that this
lofty conception, and the sense of a degradation entailed upon human
nature itself, in the spectacle of human beings matched against each other
like brute beasts, and pouring out their blood upon the arena as a
libation to the caprices of a mob, could have been derived from any other
source than the contagion of Christian standards and Christian sentiments,
then beginning to pervade and ventilate the atmosphere of society in its
higher and philosophic regions. Christianity, without expressly affirming,
every where indirectly supposes and presumes the infinite value and
dignity of man as a creature, exclusively concerned in a vast and
mysterious economy of restoration to a state of moral beauty and power in
some former age mysteriously forfeited.
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