It was not that Rome, atheist or religious, objected to the worship of Baal. She had her own and a round dozen other Jupiters, as men conceived him to be, and was quite ready to include him amongst the number. The trouble was that rational thinking men could not bring their minds to conceive of any supreme potency in the world, outside man himself; while religious persons had each his own particular conceit in the way of deities, all of which the new Emperor, with more zeal than discretion, proceeded to make subject to his own Lord’s will. But there was obviously more than mere amalgamation in Antonine’s scheme. We have already pointed out the Emperor’s position of supremacy over the old cults, and discussed the disintegrating tendency of the mystical and independent monotheisms, which was already apparent even in the city itself. The danger which these new religions imported into political life lay in the establishment of an imperium over the souls of men, which, based on superstitious terrors rather than on any appeal to reason or logic, claimed an authority over the mind equal to that of the State over the persons of its subjects. The main attraction of these forms of faith lay in their ability to supply men with a personal and spiritual religion, which, being free from State intervention, was able to incite its adherents to rebellion, against any policy of which its priesthood disapproved, on spiritual or even on financial grounds. Statesmen had long recognised the danger, and were obviously attempting to cope with the new forces. Antonine’s proposal was one for the extension of his jurisdiction (as Pontifex Maximus) to the new monotheisms, by the amalgamation of these with the older worships over which his authority as Pontifex Maximus was unchallenged. If he had succeeded he would have exerted his headship of religion in much the same fashion as Elizabeth Tudor—claiming a similar headship—exerted hers in the sixteenth century. This policy meant the appointment of State officials endowed with the wealth, titles, and a portion of the vesture of those old prelates, who had by their traditions and claims to magical powers, coerced, and indeed still coerce the minds of the credulous to the disintegration of the State. Antonine foreshadowed what Tudor greatness effected; namely, the erection of a State church, whose business it was to replace an independent priesthood which fostered fanaticism, by a race of civil servants who would restrain and modify superstition, turning all dangerous and harmful elements in the religious life into useful and philanthropic energies, concerning whose profit it would take an anchorite to disagree.