To see the new and the old man side by side was enough to assure one that the future lay with Jesus. Corruption and decrepitude marked every feature of Gentile life. It was gangrened with vice,--"wasting away in its deceitful lusts."
St Paul had before his eyes, as he wrote, a conspicuous type of the decaying Pagan order. He had appealed as a citizen of the empire to _Caesar_ as his judge. He was in durance as _Nero's_ prisoner, and was acquainted with the life of the palace (Phil. i. 13). Never, perhaps, has any line of rulers dominated mankind so absolutely or held in their single hand so completely the resources of the world as did the Caesars of St Paul's time. Their name has ever since served to mark the summit of autocratic power. It was, surely, the vision of Tiberius sitting at Rome that Jesus saw in the wilderness, when "the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and said, All this hath been delivered to me, and to whomsoever I will I give it." The Emperor was the topstone of the splendid edifice of Pagan civilization, that had been rearing for so many ages. And Nero was the final product and paragon of the Caesarean house!
At this epoch, writes M. Renan,[123] "_Nero and Jesus_, Christ and Antichrist, stand opposed, confronting each other, if I may dare to say so, like heaven and hell.... In face of Jesus there presents itself a monster, who is the ideal of evil as Jesus of goodness.... Nero's was an evil nature, hypocritical, vain, frivolous, prodigiously given to declamation and display; a blending of false intellect, profound wickedness, cruel and artful egotism carried to an incredible degree of refinement and subtlety.... He is a monster who has no second in history, and whose equal we can only find in the pathological annals of the scaffold.... The school of crime in which he had grown up, the execrable influence of his mother, the stroke of parricide forced upon him, as one might say, by this abominable woman, by which he had entered on the stage of public life, made the world take to his eyes the form of a horrible comedy, with himself for the chief actor in it. At the moment we have now reached [when St Paul entered Rome], Nero had detached himself completely from the philosophers who had been his tutors. He had killed nearly all his relations. He had made the most shameful follies the common fashion. A large part of Roman society, following his example, had descended to the lowest level of debasement. The cruelty of the ancient world had reached its consummation.... The world had touched the bottom of the abyss of evil; it could only reascend."
Such was the man who occupied at this time the summit of human power and glory,--the man who lighted the torch of Christian martyrdom and at whose sentence St Paul's head was destined to fall, the Wild Beast of John's awful vision. Nero of Rome, the son of Agrippina, embodied the triumph of Satan as the god of this world. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, reigned only in a few loving and pure hearts. Future history, as the scroll of the Apocalypse unfolded it, was to be the battle-field of these confronting powers, the war of Christ with Antichrist.
Could it be doubtful, to any one who had measured the rival forces, on which side victory must fall? St Paul pronounces the fate of the whole kingdom of evil in this world, when he declares that "the old man" is "perishing, according to the lusts of deceit." It is an application of the maxim he gave us in Galatians vi. 8: "He that soweth to his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption." In its mad sensuality and prodigal lusts, the vile Roman world he saw around him was speeding to its ruin. That ruin was delayed; there were moral forces left in the fabric of the Roman State, which in the following generations re-asserted themselves and held back for a time the tide of disaster; but in the end Rome fell, as the ancient world-empires of the East had fallen, through her own corruption, and by "the wrath" which is "revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." For the solitary man, for the household, for the body politic and the family of nations the rule is the same. "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."