of human pride, and equally absurd, whether under the form of existence in another sphere, or under that of transmigration.* CHAP. I. of Foreign We return then again to the question, what re- Reception mained for minds thus enlightened beyond the Religions. poetic faith of their ancestors, yet not ripe for philosophy? how was the craving for religious excitement to be appeased, which turned with dissatisfaction or disgust from its accustomed nutriment? Here is the secret of the remarkable union between the highest reason and the most abject superstition which characterises the age of Imperial Rome. Every foreign religion found proselytes in the capital of the world; not only the pure and rational theism of the Jews, which had made a progress, the extent of which it is among the most difficult questions in history to estimate: but the Oriental rites of Phrygia, and the Isiac and Serapic worship of Egypt, which, in defiance of the edict of the magistrate† and the scorn of the philosopher, maintained their ground in the capital, and were so widely propagated among the provinces, that their vestiges may be traced in the remote districts of Gault and Britain §; and at a later period the reviving Mithriac Mysteries, which in the same manner made their way into the western provinces of the empire. In the capital itself, § I have been informed that in some recent excavations at York, vestiges of Isiac worship have been discovered. Réligions de l'Antiquité, i. 363.; and note o, p. 743. CHAP. I. Poetry ceases to be religious. every thing that was new, or secret, or imposing, found a welcome reception among a people that listened with indifference to philosophers who reasoned, and poets who embodied philosophy in the most attractive diction. For in Rome, poetry had forsworn the alliance of the old imaginative faith. The irreligious system of Euhemerus* had found a translator in Ennius; that of Epicurus was commended by the unrivalled powers of Lucretius. Virgil himself, who, as he collected from all quarters the beauties of ancient poetry, so he inlaid in his splendid tessellation the noblest images of the poetic faith of Greece: yet, though at one moment he transfuses mythology into his stately verse, with all the fire of an ardent votary, at the next he appears as a pantheist, and describes the Deity but as the animating soul of the universe. † An occasional fit of superstition crosses over the careless and Epicurean apathy of Horace. + Astrology and witchcraft § led captive minds, which boasted them * Euhemerus either of Messina in Sicily or of Messene in Peloponnesus (he lived in the time of Cassander king of Macedon), was of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy, and was employed on a voyage to the Red Sea by Cassander. But he was still more celebrated for his theologic innovation: he pretended to have discovered during this voyage on an island in the Eastern Ocean, called Panchaia, a register of the births and deaths of the gods inscribed on a golden column in the temple of the Triphylian Jupiter. Hence he inferred that all the popular deities were mere mortals deified on account of their fame, or their benefactions to the human race. Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 42. Plut. de Isid. et Osir. p.421. Brucker, i. 604. † Æn. vi. 724. According to his life by Donatus Virgil was an Epicurean. ↑ Insanientis dum sapientiæ Consultus erro, nunc retrorsum Vela dare, atque iterare cursus Cogor relictos. And this because he heard thunder at noon-day. § See the Canidia of Horace. According to Gibbon's just criticism, a" vulgar witch," the Erictho of Lucan, is " tedious, disgusting, but sometimes sublime." Note, ch. xxv. vol. iv. p. 239. It is the dif ference between the weird sisters in Macbeth and Middleton's "Witch," excepting of course the prolixity of Lucan. I. -} selves emancipated from the idle terrors of the CHAP. avenging gods. In the Pharsalia of Lucan, which manifestly soars far above the vulgar theology, where the lofty Stoicism elevates the brave man who disdains, above the gods who flatter, the rising fortunes of Cæsar; yet in the description of the witch Erictho evoking the dead (the only purely imaginative passage in the whole rhetorical poem), there is a kind of tremendous truth and earnestness, which show that if the poet himself believed not "the magic wonders which he drew," at least he well knew the terrors that would strike the age in which he wrote. tions. The old established traders in human cre- Superstidulity had almost lost their occupation, but their place was supplied by new empirics, who swarmed from all quarters. The oracles were silent, while astrology seized the administration of the secrets of futurity. Pompey, and Crassus, and Cæsar, all consulted the Chaldeans*, whose flattering predictions that they should die in old age, in their homes, in glory, so belied by their miserable fates, still brought not the unblushing science into disrepute. The repeated edicts which expelled the astrologers and "mathematicians" from Rome, was no less an homage to their power over the public mind, than their recall, the tacit permission to return, or the return in defiance of the insulted edict. Banished by Agrippat, by Augustust, by Tiberius §, by Claudius, they are described in the inimitable * Chaldeis sed major erit fiducia, quicquid Juv. vi. 553. + Dio. xlix. c. 43. Dio. lvi. c. 25. Tac. Ann. xii. 52. -} CHAP. language of Tacitus, as a race who, treacherous to those in power, fallacious to those who hope for power, are ever proscribed, yet will ever remain.* They were at length taken under the avowed patronage of Vespasian and his successors.† All these circumstances were manifest indications of the decay, and of the approaching dissolution of the old religion. The elegiac poet had read, not without sagacity, the signs of the times. Revolution effected by Christianity. None sought the aid of foreign gods, while bow'd And thus, in this struggle between the old house- Such is the state in which the ancient world leaves the mind of man. On a sudden a new era commences; a rapid yet gradual revolution takes place in the opinions, sentiments, and principles of mankind; the void is filled; the connection be * Genus hominum, potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax, quod in civitate nostrâ et vetabitur semper et retinebitur. Tac. Hist. i. 22. + Tac. Hist. ii. 78. Suet. in Vesp. Dio. lxviii. Suet. in Dom. xiv. xv. ↑ Nulli cura fuit externos quærere Divos, Cum tremeret patrio pendula turba foro. PROP. iv. 1-17. Propertius may be considered in one sense the most religious poet of this period: his verses teem with mythological allusion, but it is poetical ornament rather than the natural language of piety; it has much of the artificial school of the Alexandrian Callimachus, his avowed model, nothing of the simplicity of faith which breathed in Pindar and Sophocles. tween religion and morals re-established with an intimacy of union yet unknown. The unity of the Deity becomes, not the high and mysterious creed of a privileged sacerdotal or intellectual oligarchy, but the common property of all whose minds are fitted to receive it: all religious distinctions are annihilated; the jurisdictions of all local deities abolished; and imperceptibly the empire of Rome becomes one great Christian commonwealth, which even sends out, as it were, its peaceful colonies into regions beyond the limits of the Imperial power. The characteristic distinction of the general revolution is this, that the physical agency of the Deity seems to recede from the view, while the spiritual character is more distinctly unfolded; or rather, the notion of the Divine Power is merged in the more prevailing sentiment of his moral Goodness. The remarkable passage in the Jewish history, in which God is described as revealing himself to Elijah, "neither in the strong wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice," may be considered, we will not say prophetic, but singularly significant of the sensations to be excited in the human mind by the successive revelations of the Deity. CHAP. soul. .I. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul par- Immortaltook in the same change with the notion of the ity of the Deity; it became at once popular, simple, and spiritual. It was disseminated throughout all orders of society it admitted no aristocratic elysium of heroes and demi-gods, like that of the early Greeks* ; * It is curious to see, in another mythology, the same martial aristocratic spirit which, in the earlier religions, excluded the apɛvnva |