I. Alexander; the temple was desecrated, the altar thrown down, CHAP. the priesthood degraded or put to the sword, this was done in the fierceness of hostility, or the insolence of pride; or from policy, lest the religion should become the rallying point of civil independence; rarely, if ever, for the purpose of extirpating a false, or supplanting it by a true, system of belief; perhaps in no instance with the design of promulgating the tenets of a more pure and perfect religion. A wiser policy commenced Policy of with Alexander. The deities of the conquered nations were treated with uniform reverence, the sacrilegious plunder of their temples punished with exemplary severity. According to the Grecian system, their own gods were recognised in those of Egypt and Asia; they were called by Grecian names §, and worshipped with the accustomed offerings; and thus all religious differences between Macedonian, and Syrian, and Egyptian, and Persian, at once vanished away. Such was the conduct of Cambyses in Egypt. Xerxes had, before his Grecian invasion, shown the proud intolerance of his disposition, in destroying the deities of the Babylonians, and slaying their priesthood (Herod. i. 183., and Arrian, vii. 19.); though, in this case, the rapacity which fatally induced him to pillage and desecrate the temples of Greece may have combined with his natural arrogance. Herod. viii. 53. This was most likely the principle of the horrible persecution of the Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, though a kind of heathen bigotry On the same principle, seems to have mingled with his Arrian, lib. vi. p. 431. 439. Arrian, lib. iii. p. 158., vii. p. 464., and 486. Some Persian traditions, perhaps, represent Alexander as a religious persecutor; but these are of no authority against the direct statement of the Greek historians. The Indian religious usages, and the conduct of some of their faquirs, excited the wonder of the Greeks. I. CHAP. and with equal sagacity, Rome, in this as in other respects, aspired to enslave the mind of those naof Rome. tions which had been prostrated by her arms. The gods of the subject nations were treated with every mark of respect: sometimes they were admitted within the walls of the conqueror, as though to render their allegiance, and rank themselves in peaceful subordination under the supreme divinity of the Roman Gradivus, or the Jupiter of the Capitol; till, at length, they all met in the amicable synod of the Pantheon, a representative assembly, as it were, of the presiding deities of all nations, in Rome, the religious as well as the civil capital of the world. † The state, as Cicero shows in his Book of Laws, retained the power of declaring what forms of religion were permitted by Solere Romanos Deos omnes urbium superatarum partim privatim per familias spargere, partim publice consecrare. Arnob. iii. 38. It was a grave charge against Marcellus, that, by plundering the temples in Sicily, he had made the state an object of jealousy (rip00vov), because not only men but gods were led in triumph. The older citizens approved rather the conduct of Fabius Maximus, who left to the Tarentines their offended gods. Plut. Vit. Marc. According to Verrius Flaccus, cited by Pliny (xxviii. 2.), the Romans used to invoke the tutelary deity of every place which they besieged, and bribed him, to their side by promising greater honours. Macrobius has a copy of the form of Evocation. The name of the tutelar deity of Rome was a secret. Pliny, Nat. H. iii. 5. Bayle, Art. Soranus. Plut. Quæst. Rom. Note on Hume's Hist. Nat. Rel. Essays, p. 450. currum Roma triumphantis quotiens ducis inclita Compare Augustin de Cons. For the Grecian custom on this subject, see Thucyd. iv. 98. Philip, the king of Macedon, defeated by Flaminius in his wars with the Grecian states, paid little respect to the temples. His admiral Dicæarchus is said to have erected and sacrificed on two altars to Impiety and Lawlessness, 'Aoɛ6eia and Пapavópa. This fact would be incredible on less grave authority than that of Polybius, lib. xviii. 37. On the general respect to temples in war, comp. Grot. de Jur. Bell. et Pac. iii. 12. 6. I. the law (licita)*; but this authority was rarely CHAP. exercised with rigour, excepting against such foreign superstitions as were considered pernicious to the morals of the people, in earlier times, the Dionysiact; in later, the Isiac and Serapic rites. + ity of Chris tianity. Christianity proclaimed itself the religion not of Universalfamily, or tribe, or nation, but of universal man. It admitted within its pale, on equal terms, all ranks and all races. It addressed mankind as one brotherhood, sprung from one common progenitor, and raised to immortality by one Redeemer. In this respect Christianity might appear singularly adapted to become the religion of a great empire. At an earlier period in the annals of the world, it would have encountered obstacles apparently insurmountable, in passing from one province to another, in moulding hostile and jealous nations into one religious community. A fiercer fire was necessary to melt and fuse the discordant elements into one kindred mass, before its gentler warmth could penetrate and permeate the whole with its vivifying influence. Not only were the circumstances of the times favourable to the extensive propagation of Christianity, from the facility of intercourse between the most remote na The question is well discussed by Jortin, Discourses, p. 53. note. Dionysius Hal. distinguishes between religions permitted, and publicly received. lib. 11. vol. i. p.275. edit. Reiske. + Livy, xxix. 12. et seqq. During the republic, the tem ples of Isis and Serapis were twice note. I. CHAP. tions, the cessation of hostile movements, and the uniform system of internal police, but the state of mankind seemed imperiously to demand the introduction of a new religion, to satisfy those universal propensities of human nature, which connect man with a higher order of things. Man, as history and experience teach, is essentially a religious being; there are certain faculties and modes of thinking and feeling apparently inseparable from his mental organisation, which lead him irresistibly to seek some communication with another and a higher world. But at the present juncture, the ancient religions were effete: they belonged to a totally different state of civilisation; though they retained the strong hold of habit and interest on different classes of society, yet the general mind was advanced beyond them; they could not supply the religious necessities of the age. Thus, the world, peaceably united under one temporal monarchy, might be compared to a vast body without a soul: the throne of the human mind appeared vacant; among the rival competitors for its dominion, none advanced more than claims local, or limited to a certain class. Nothing less was required than a religion co-extensive with the empire of Rome, and calculated for the advanced state of intellectual culture and in Christianity this new element of society was found; which, in fact, incorporating itself with manners, usages, and laws, has been the bond which has held together, notwithstanding the internal feuds and divisions, the great European commonwealth; maintained a kind of federal re lation between its parts; and stamped its peculiar CHAP. character on the whole of modern history. I. principle of Christianity announced the appearance of its Dissociating Divine Author as the era of a new moral creation; old religions. and if we take our stand, as it were, on the isthmus which separates the ancient from the modern world, and survey the state of mankind before and after the introduction of this new power into human society, it is impossible not to be struck with the total revolution in the whole aspect of the world. If from this point of view we look upward, we see the dissociating principle at work both in the civil and religious usages of mankind; the human race breaking up into countless independent tribes and nations, which recede more and more from each other as they gradually spread over the surface of the earth; and in some parts, as we adopt the theory of the primitive barbarism*, or that of the degeneracy of man from an earlier state of culture, either remaining stationary at the lowest point of ignorance and rudeness, or sinking to it; either resuming the primeval dignity of the race, or rising gradually to a higher state of civilisation. A certain diversity of religion follows the diversity of race, * The notion that the primeval state of man was altogether barbarous and uncivilised, so generally prevalent in the philosophy of the two last centuries (for Dryden's line, Since wild in woods the noble savage ran, contains the whole theory of Rousseau) has encountered a strong reaction. It is remarkable that Niebuhr in Germany, and Archbishop Whateley in this country, with no knowledge of each other's views, should at the same time call in |