By the ascription to the imperial dignity of priestly offices and titles belonging to the popular religion, it was indeed attempted to give it a more sacred character and sanction. This, however, secured to the emperor no real accession of power. Such was the state of decay and weakness in which religion, no less than morals, was sunk. The heathenism of those days consisted in nothing but some poetical legends, external rites, and ceremonial pomp, which occasionally found a philosophical interpretation, but without a proper intrinsic substance and coherence, and an organized priesthood--all which are to be still found in the ancient religion of the Hindoos. And it was only a natural addition to the other numerous inconsistencies--it only rendered the whole drama the more revolting, if, after an inhuman reign, and after being at last put out of the way in a very human, and, at the same time, very _un_human way, the hated tyrant was in conclusion placed among the national gods. And if under Aurelius and the Antonines better days appeared, still they were but brief and transitory, since they did not, and in truth could not, possess any historical confirmation and moral basis like that of the hereditary monarchy of Christian times and states. In jurisprudence, not only as a science, but in its practical administration, the Romans have in all ages, and even modern times, been justly famous. One reason, perhaps, of this was the fact, that all who still retained the least sense of right and justice, withdrawing from the dangers of political life and honors, retired to the still inviolate domain of law, and devoted themselves to the development of the old juristic principles. But when the whole social frame, and the very principle of civil existence has become in its inmost essence unrighteous, and based on injustice, a few just laws about property, and robbery, and fraud, and murder, and the like (offenses which, generally speaking, are, for the most part, essentially the same in all times and places), can profit little. Equally unavailing, too, are the shrewdest and most sagacious of juridical treatises on such topics. To extol the Roman Empire on this ground would be tantamount to praising one of the worst and most pernicious systems of philosophical error, or excusing it because it does not violate, or, rather, because it necessarily observes, the ordinary rules of logic, which, however, does not by any means lessen or remove the error, but, on the contrary, aggravates it; since by rendering it so much the more specious, it does but gain for it a more ready acceptance among men.