"In your public square there are two statues of Mars, the one naked, the other armed; and close by, the figure of a man who, with three fingers advanced towards Mars, holds in check that divinity, so dangerous to the whole town. With regard to what you say of such gods, being portions of the only true God, I take the liberty you give me, to warn you not to fall into such a sacrilege; for that only God, of whom you speak, is doubtless He who is acknowledged by the whole world, and concerning whom, as some of the ancients have said, the ignorant agree with the learned. Now, will you say that he whose strength, if not his cruelty, is represented by an inanimate man, is a portion of that God? I could easily push you hard on this subject; for you will clearly see how much might be said upon it; but I refrain, lest you should say that I employ against you the weapons of rhetoric rather than those of virtue." We know not what was signified by these two statues, of which no vestige is left us; but not all the statues with which Rome was filled--not the Pantheon and all the temples consecrated to the inferior gods, nor even those of the twelve greater gods prevented "_Deus Optimus Maximus_"--"God, most good, most great"--from being acknowledged throughout the empire. The misfortune of the Romans, then, was their ignorance of the Mosaic law, and afterwards, of the law of the disciples of our Saviour Jesus Christ--their want of the faith--their mixing with the worship of a supreme God the worship of Mars, of Venus, of Minerva, of Apollo, who did not exist, and their preserving that religion until the time of the Theodosii. Happily, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Heruli, the Lombards, the Franks, who destroyed that empire, submitted to the truth, and enjoyed a blessing denied to Scipio, to Cato, to Metellus, to Emilius, to Cicero, to Varro, to Virgil, and to Horace. None of these great men knew Jesus Christ, whom they could not know; yet they did not worship the devil, as so many pedants are every day repeating. How should they worship the devil, of whom they had never heard? _A Calumny on Cicero by Warburton, on the Subject of a Supreme God._ Warburton, like his contemporaries, has calumniated Cicero and ancient Rome. He boldly supposes that Cicero pronounced these words, in his "Oration for Flaccus": "It is unworthy of the majesty of the empire to adore only one God"--"_Majestatem imperii non decuit ut unus tantum Deus colatur."