Virginis hic teneræ, lector miserere sepultæ; Unius huic lustri vix fuit acta dies. O quam longinquæ fuerat dignissima vitæ Heu! cujus vivit nunc sine fine dolor-- Sola tamen tanti restant solatia luctus Quod tales animæ protinus astra petunt.[128] Upon the whole the evidence, negative even more than positive, of the Roman sepulcral inscriptions, abundantly confirms the testimony of heathen as well as Christian writers, to the absence of any definite and practical belief in a future state, in the three or four first centuries after the Christian æra. Yet few would be able tranquilly to acquiesce in the doctrine of annihilation. They sought in other sources for that assurance which neither religion nor philosophy could afford them. Never was the practice of magic, incantations, necromancy, and mysteries more prevalent than during the period in which Christianity was slowly supplanting the ancient superstitions. It was evident that the fulness of the times was come, and that if the world were not to be divided between the victims of religious imposture and the disciples of Epicurus, light from on high must visit the earth. Other inscriptions, not properly sepulcral, afford the same proof of the loss of all vital power in the old religion. Among all the religious monuments which the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society contains, there is not one to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, or any of the great gods of the popular creed. There is one to Hercules--a hero, not a god; one to Fortune--a deified personification; one to the Genius of the place--an elegant creation of poetry; one to the fictitious deity of the Emperor. The gods of the barbarians have evidently dethroned those of Greece and Rome. The legate of a Roman Legion records that he has rebuilt from the foundation a temple of the Egyptian Serapis. A Roman commander must have constructed the cave in which the mystic rites of the Asiatic Mithras were performed. We have an altar to the tutelary goddess of Brigantia; to Viterineus, a local deity of the neighbourhood of Hadrian's Wall; and, lastly, to the god Arciacon, wholly unknown but from this unique inscription. It is evident that the popular religion was altogether "a creed outworn." Art had familiarized men with the human representations of their deities; and even by the perfection of its visible and material works had destroyed the belief in their spiritual existence and invisible power. Philosophy had exposed the folly of an anthropomorphic polytheism; poetry and the stage had made the gods contemptible. Nothing was left which could awaken reverence or love: instead of aiding, the popular religion checked the impulse of the mind to connect the ideas of infinitude and deity. But in the gods of the barbarous nations, who had remained without art, and without a mythology converting gods into men, there was something obscure, mysterious, and indefinite; something on