[Footnote 15: See Juv. _Sat_. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by the mob in the Forum, exclaimed,--"Silence, ye stepsons of Italy! What! shall I fear these fellows now they are free, whom I myself have brought in chains to Rome?" (See Cic. _De Orat_. ii. 61.)] II. It was an age at once of atheism and superstition. Strange to say, the two things usually go together. Just as Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans, disbelieved in God, and yet tried to conjecture his fate from the inspection of coffee-grounds at the bottom of a cup,--just as Louis XI. shrank from no perjury and no crime, and yet retained a profound reverence for a little leaden image which he carried in his cap,--so the Romans under the Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers, exorcists, and every species of imposter and quack. The ceremonies of religion were performed with ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was dead and gone. "That there are such things as ghosts and subterranean realms not even boys believe," says Juvenal, "except those who are still too young to pay a farthing for a bath." [16] Nothing can exceed the cool impertinence with which the poet Martial prefers the favour of Domitian to that of the great Jupiter of the Capitol. Seneca, in his lost book "Against Superstitions,"[17] openly sneered at the old mythological legends of gods married and gods unmarried, and at the gods Panic and Paleness, and at Cloacina, the goddess of sewers, and at other deities whose cruelty and license would have been infamous even in mankind. And yet the priests, and Salii, and Flamens, and Augurs continued to fulfil their solemn functions, and the highest title of the Emperor himself was that of _Pontifex Maximus_, or Chief Priest, which he claimed as the recognized head of the national religion. "The common worship was regarded," says Gibbon, "by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful." And this famous remark is little more than a translation from Seneca, who, after exposing the futility of the popular beliefs, adds: "And yet the wise man will observe them all, not as pleasing to the gods, but as commanded by the laws. We shall so adore _all that ignoble crowd of gods_ which long superstition has heaped together in a long period of years, as to remember that their worship has more to do with custom than with reality." "Because he was an illustrious senator of the Roman people," observes St. Augustine, who has preserved for us this fragment, "he worshipped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he adored that with which he found fault." Could anything be more hollow or heartless than this? Is there anything which is more certain to sap the very foundations of morality than the public maintenance of a creed which has long ceased to command the assent, and even the respect of its