with loathing all participation in the rites of heathenism. As the first preachers of Christianity went from city to city, it was in the synagogues that they first gained a hearing, and found a starting-point for their labors. There the law and the prophets were read on every Sabbath; and there would be found assemblies capable of apprehending, even if disinclined to believe, the proclamation of Jesus as the predicted Messiah.

5. What was the effect of the union and commingling of nations upon the heathen religions? The consideration of the general state of religion in the Roman Empire is reserved for subsequent pages. We advert here to a single circumstance, the effect which must have resulted, and which, as history tells us, did result from the combination of so many nations under one sovereignty. There had existed a multiplicity of local religions. The gods of each people, it was believed, had ordained the method of their worship within the bounds of the territory over which they stood as guardians. National divinities were treated with respect by the Romans, and the diversified systems of worship were left untouched as long as they kept within their own limits. This was the extent of Roman toleration. For Roman citizens to bring in new divinities, or foreign rites of worship, was both repugnant to the laws, and abhorrent to conservative Roman feeling. Cicero, with all his liberality of sentiment, advocates, in his book of "the Laws," the suppression, among the Roman people themselves, of all departures from the legally established cultus.1 Loyalty to the state involved a strict adherence to the state-religion. But polytheism could find room in its Pantheon for an indefinite number of deities. In early times, when the Romans attacked a foreign tribe, or city, they were at pains to invite in solemn form the local divinities to abandon

1 De Legibus, B. ii.

the place where they were worshipped, and to transfer their abode to Rome. What must have been the effect upon the conquered nations of the inability or unwillingness of their ancestral gods to defend their own temples and worshippers? It is hardly possible that a shock should not have been given, in many instances, to the faith and devotion which experienced so terrible a disappointment. But our main inquiry here relates to the effect upon the minds of men of a familiar acquaintance with so great a variety of dissimilar religions. As regards a certain class, the tendency unquestionably was to engender skepticism. Lucian may stand as a representative of this class. In one of his diverting dialogues,' he represents Jupiter as pale and anxious on account of a debate which had sprung up on earth between Damis, an Epicurean Atheist, and Timocles, who maintained that there are gods and a providence. To avert a common danger all the divinities were summoned to a council. They came in a throng, those with names, and those without a name, from Egypt, and Syria, Persia, and Thrace, and every country under the sun. Mercury, to whom it belonged to seat them, could not quell their wrangles for precedence, and Jupiter ordered them to be seated promiscuously until a council could be convoked to determine their rank. While the debate goes on below between Damis and Timocles, the gods tremble with anxiety lest their champion should be worsted, and they should lose, as a consequence, their offerings and honors. Timocles appeals to the universal belief in the gods. "Thank you," rejoins Damis, "for putting me in mind of the laws and manners of nations, which sufficiently show how uncertain everything is which relates to their gods; it is nothing but error and confusion. Some worship one, and some another. The Scythians sacrifice to a 'Jupiter Tragoedus.

scimetar; the Thracians to Zamolxis, who came to them, a fugitive from Samos; the Phrygians to Mine [the moon]; the Cyllenians to Phales; the Assyrians to a Dove; the Persians to Fire; the Egyptians to Water." Then the special sorts of Egyptian worship, all differing from each other, are enumerated; and Damis concludes his lively speech with the exclamation: "How ridiculous, my good Timocles, is such variety!" It would be an error to conclude that the spirit of this passage, and of other passages in Lucian of like tenor, prevailed among his contemporaries. Yet it is obvious that he did not stand alone. All these religions must have seemed to many a confused jumble, and have moved some to reject all in common, if not to disbelieve in anything divine.

Another large class were tempted to forsake, in a degree at least, their traditional creed and worship, and to espouse another, it might be some older religion from the East, which came clothed with the fascination of mystery.

A tendency to syncretism-to a mingling of heterogeneous religions-was a notable characteristic of the age contemporaneous with the introduction of Christianity. Men of a philosophical turn, in whom reverence for religion was still strong, sought to combine in a catholic system, and in harmonious unity, the apparently discordant creeds of heathenism. Plutarch is a conspicuous example of this tendency. The effort, futile as it proved, was one of the signs of the times, and was owing largely to the commingling of nations, and of the multiform religions which had divided the homage of mankind. An escape was sought from the distracting influence of polytheism, by an identification of divinities bearing different names, and by connecting a conception of the divine unity with the admission of multitudinous deities with subordinate functions. Old beliefs were dissolving, at least were assuming new

he

forms, in the ferment of the Roman world. But the hope that there could be one religion for all mankind was deemed visionary. Celsus, the noted opponent of Christianity in the second century, thought that it might be a good thing "if all the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Lybia, Greeks and barbarians, all to the uttermost ends of the earth" were to come under one religious system; but, says, "any one who thinks this possible knows nothing." An expectation of this sort struck him as utterly chimerical. The Emperor Julian who dreamed of restoring paganism from its fall could not consider it natural or possible for the different nations to have a common religion. Their diversities were too radical. The Roman Empire did much to prepare the way for a universal religion; but such a religion it had no power to create from the materials of polytheism.

The idea of a common humanity, far as it was from attaining the force of a practical conviction, capable of neutralizing deeply-rooted prejudices of an opposite nature, was obscurely present in the minds even of men unused to philosophic speculation. The line of Terence,

"Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,”— "I am a man; nothing that affects man is indifferent to me" -signified, in the connection where it occurs, that the calamities which afflict one man should interest all. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." A Roman theatre, filled though it was with an ignorant rabble, when that line was heard, rang with applause.3

1 Origenes c. Celsum, viii. 72.

2 Heaut. Act i. Sc. i. 25. On the use made of this passage by Cicero, and other ancient and modern writers, see Parry, P. Terentii Comœdiæ, p. 174. "I think, articulate, I laugh and weep,

And exercise all functions of a man.

How then should I and any man that lives

Be strangers to each other?"

'Augustine, Ep., 52.

-CowPER, The Task. (The Garden.)

CHAPTER III.

THE POPULAR RELIGION OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS.

THE heathen religions did not spring out of a mere scientific curiosity which, in its rude beginning, can give no better account of the world than to attribute it to a multitude of personal agents. No explanation of the origin of heathenism is adequate, which fails to recognize the religious factor,--the sense of the supernatural, the feelings of dependence and accountableness, and that yearning for a higher communion which is native to the soul. These innate sentiments lie at the root of religion, even in its cruder forms. "I consider it impossible "-writes one of the most genial and profound of scholars-" that that allcomprehending and all-pervading belief in the divine essence, which we find in the earliest times among the Greeks, as well as other nations, can be deduced in a convincing manner from sensible impressions, and conclusions built thereon; and I am of opinion, that the historian must here rest satisfied with pre-supposing that the assumption of a hyper-physical living world and nature, which lay at the bottom of every phenomenon, was natural and necessary to the mind of man, richly endowed by nature." This native faith was determined as to the particular forms it should assume, by the nature and circumstances of individual nations and tribes: hence the various modes of religion. Under the prompting of this latent belief, the

'K. O. Müller, Proleg. zu einer wissenschaftl. Myth., Leitch's English Transl., p. 176.