Heaven; the philosophic historian, whose profounder mind seems struggling with hostile prejudices, defines with his own inimitable compression of language, the doctrine, to the sublimity of which he has closed his eyes. "The worship of the Jews is purely mental; they acknowledge but one God- and that God supreme and eternal, neither changeable, nor perishable." The doctrine of another life (which derived no sanction from the Law, and was naturally obscured by the more immediate and intelligible prospect of temporal rewards and punishments,) dawns in the prophetic writings; and from the apocryphal books and from Josephus, as well as from the writings of the New Testament, clearly appears to have become incorporated with the general sentiment. Retribution in another life has already taken the place of the immediate or speedy avenging or rewarding providence of the Deity in the land of Canaan. + CHAP. I. of Judaism. Judaism however only required to expand with Expansion the expansion of the human mind; its sacred records had preserved in its original simplicity the notion of the Divine Power; the pregnant definitions of the one great self-existing Being, the magnificent poetical amplifications of his might and providence were of all ages: they were eternal poetry, because they were eternal truth. If the moral aspect of * Nil præter nubes et cœli numen adorant. Juv. xiv. 97. Judæi mente solâ, unumque numen intelligunt. * *Summum illud et æternum, neque mutabile, I. CHAP. the Divine nature was more obscurely intimated, and, in this respect, had assumed the character of a local or national Deity, whose love was confined to the chosen people, and displayed itself chiefly in the beneficence of a temporal sovereign yet nothing was needed but to give a higher and more extensive sense to those types and shadows of universal wisdom; an improvement which the tendency of the age manifestly required; and which the Jews themselves, especially the Alexandrian school, had already attempted, by allegorising the whole annals of their people, and extracting a profound moral meaning from all the circumstances of their extraordinary history.* Effects of progress of But the progress of knowledge was fatal to the knowledge popular religion of Greece and Rome. The aweupon poly- struck imagination of the older race, which had theism. listened with trembling belief to the wildest fables, the deep feeling of the sublime and the beautiful, which, uniting with national pride, had assembled adoring multitudes before the Parthenon or the Jove of Phidias, now gave place to cold and sober reason. Poetry had been religion-religion was becoming mere poetry. Humanizing the Deity, and bringing it too near the earth, naturally produced, in a less imaginative and more reflecting *Philo wrote for the unbelievers among his own people, and to conciliate the Greeks. (De Conf. Linguar, vol. i. p. 405.) The same principle which among the heathens gave rise to the system of Euhemerus, who resolved all mythology into history, and that of the other philosophers who attempted to reduce it to allegory, induced Philo, and no doubt his predecessor Aristobulus, thus to endeavour to accommodate the Mosaic history to an incredulous age, and to blend Judaism and Platonism into one harmonious system. I. age, that familiarity which destroys respect. When СНАР. man became more acquainted with his own nature, the less was he satisfied with deities cast in his own mould. In some respects the advancement of Beneficial. civilisation had no doubt softened and purified the old religions from their savage and licentious tendencies. Human sacrifices had ceased*, or had retired to the remotest parts of Germany, or to the shores of the Baltic.t Though some of the secret rites were said to be defiled with unspeakable * Human sacrifices sometimes, but rarely, occur in the earlier periods of Grecian history. According to Plutarch, Vit. Arist. 9. and Vit. Themistoclis, three sons of Sandauke, sister of the king of Persia, were offered, in obedience to an oracle, to Bacchus Omestes. The bloodstained altar of Diana of Tauris was placed by the tragedians in a barbarous region. Prisoners were sometimes slain on the tombs of warriors in much later times, as in the Homeric age, even on that of Philopomen. Plut. Vit. Philop. c. 21. Compare Tschirner, Fall des Heidenthums, p. 34. As to Octavius is said (Suet. Vit. Octav.) to have sacrificed 300 Perugian captives on an altar sacred to the deified Julius (Divo Julio). This may be considered the sanguinary spirit of the age of proscriptions taking for once a more solemn and religious form. the libation of the blood of the gladiators, (see Tertullian, Apolog. c. 9. Scorpiac. 7. Cyprian, De Spectaculis. Compare Porphyr. de Abstin. Lactant. i-21.) I should agree with M. Constant in ascribing this ceremony to the barbarity of the Roman amusements rather than to their religion. All public spec tacles were, perhaps, to a certain Tac. Ann. i. 61. Tac. Germ. 10. I. CHAP. pollutions*, yet this, if true, arose from the depravation of manners, rather than from religion. The orgies of the Bona Dea were a profanation of the sacred rite, held up to detestation by the indignant satirist, not as among some of the early Oriental nations, the rite itself. Prejudicial. But with the tyranny, which could thus extort from reluctant human nature the sacrifice of all humanity and all decency, the older religions had lost their more salutary, and, if the expression may be ventured, their constitutional authority. They had been driven away, or silently receded from their post, in which indeed they had never been firmly seated, as conservators of public morals. The circumstances of the times tended no less to loosen the bonds of the ancient faith. Peace enervated the deities, as well as the soldiers of Rome: their occupation was gonet; the augurs Mithriac rites, which had reintro- *The dissolute rites against M. Constant on these rites, which strikes me as extremely profouud and just: "La mauvaise influence des fables licencieuses commence avec le mépris et le ridicule versé sur ces fables. Il en est de même des cérémonies. Des rites indécens pouvent être pratiqués par un peuple réligieux avec une grande pureté de cœur. Mais quand l'incrédulité atteint ces peuples, ces rites sont pour lui la cause et la prétexte de la plus révoltante corruption." Du Polyth. Rom. ii. 102. + Our generals began to wage civil wars against each other, as soon as they neglected the auspices. Cic. Nat. Deor. ii. 3. This is good evidence to the fact; the cause lay deeper. read no longer the signs of conquest in the entrails of the victims; and though down to the days of Augustine*, Roman pride clung to the worship of the older and glorious days of the republic, and denounced the ingratitude of forsaking gods, under whose tutelary sway Rome had become the empress of the world, yet the ceremonies had now no stirring interest; they were pageants in which the unbelieving aristocracy played their parts with formal coldness, the contagion of which could not but spread to the lower classes. The only novel or exciting rite of the Roman religion, was that which probably tended more than any other, when the immediate excitement was over, to enfeeble the religious feeling, the deificationt of the living, or the apotheosis of the dead emperor, whom a few years or perhaps a few days abandoned to the open execration or contempt of the whole people. At the same time that energy of mind, which had consumed itself in foreign conquest or civil faction, in carrying the arms of Rome to the *This was the main argument of his great work, de Civitate Dei. It is no where more strongly expressed than in the oration of Symmachus to Theodosius. Hic cultus in leges meas orbem redegit; hæc sacra Annibalem a manibus, a Capitolio Sennonas repulerunt. This subject will frequently recur in the course of our History. The deification of Augustus found some opponents. Nihil Deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et effigie numinum, per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet. Tac. Ann. i. 10. The more sagacious Tiberius shrunk from such honours. In one instance, he al- CHAP. |
