A great exaltation of religious sentiment was, then, the consequence of the _Roman peace_ established by Augustus. Augustus realized it. But I ask, What satisfaction could the institutions which Rome dared to believe eternal present to the religious wants which were arising? Surely almost nothing. All the old worships, of very different origin, had one common trait. They shared equally the impossibility of reaching a theological teaching, a practical morality, an edifying preaching, a pastoral ministry truly fruitful for the people. The Pagan temple, in its best time, was the same thing as the synagogue and the church: I wish to say the common house, the school, the inn, the hospital, the shelter in which the poor sought an asylum, it was a cold _cella_, into which one seldom entered, where one learned nothing. The affectation which led the Roman patricians to distinguish the "religion," that is to say, their own worship, from the "superstition," that is to say, the worship of strangers, appears to us puerile. All the Pagan worships were essentially superstitious. The peasant who in our day places a sou in the box of a miraculous chapel, who invokes some saint on account of his oxen, or his horses, who drinks certain waters for certain maladies, is in these acts a Pagan. Indeed, nearly all our superstitions are the remains of a religion anterior to Christianity, which that has not been able to entirely uproot. If one would find the image of Paganism in our day, it must be sought in some obscure village in the depth of some out-of-the-way country. Having as guardians a popular, vacillating tradition, and selfish sacristans, the Pagan religion could but degenerate in worship. Augustus, although with a certain reserve, accepted the adoration of his subjects in the provinces. Tiberius allowed, under his own eyes, that ignoble concourse of the cities of Asia to dispute the honor of raising a temple to him. The extravagant impieties of Caligula produced no re-action: outside of Judaism there was not found a single priest to resist such follies. Coming forth, for the most part, from a primitive worship of natural forces ten times transformed by minglings of all sorts, and by the imagination of the peoples, the Pagan worships were limited by their past. One could never draw from them what had never existed in them,--Deism or instruction. The fathers of the church amuse us when they bring to notice the misdeeds of Saturn as the father of a family, and of Jupiter as a husband. But without doubt, it was still more ridiculous to set up Jupiter (that is to say, the atmosphere) as a moral god who commands, defends, rewards, and punishes. In a world which aspires to possess a catechism, what could one do with a worship like that of Venus, which arose from an old social necessity of the first Ph[oe]nician navigation in the Mediterranean, but became in time an outrage to that which one regards more and more as the essence of religion?