| Share page |
|
MORALS. |
187 |
||
|
fingers of a man's hand, and of the writing on an opposite wall, threw him into such consternation, that his thoughts terrified him, the girdles of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another. His terror in such circumstances cannot he supposed to have proceeded from a fear of man : for he was surrounded by his guards and his princes, and all the delights of music, and of a splendid entertainment. Nor did it arise from the sentence of condemnation written on the wall; for he was then ignorant both of the writina; and of its meaning. But he was conscious of the wickedness of which he had been guilty, and of the sacrilegious impiety in which he was then indulging, and, therefore, the extraordinary appearance on the wall was considered as an awful foreboding of punishment from that almighty and invisible Being whom he had offended. Tiberius, one of the Roman emperors, was a gloomy, treacherous, and cruel tyrant. The lives of his people became the sport of his savage disposition. Barely to take them away was not sufficient, if their death was not tormenting and atrocious. He ordered, on one occasion, a general massacre of all who were detained in prison, on account of the conspiracy of Sejanus his minister, and heaps of carcasses were piled up in the pub- |
|||