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
recognized defenders? Seneca, indeed, and a few enlightened
philosophers, might have taken refuge from the superstitions which they
abandoned in a truer and purer form of faith. "Accordingly," says
Lactantius, one of the Christian Fathers, "he has said many things like
ourselves concerning God." [18] He utters what Tertullian finely calls
"the testimony of A MIND NATURALLY CHRISTIAN." But, meanwhile, what
became of the common multitude? They too, like their superiors, learnt
to disbelieve or to question the power of the ancient deities; but, as
the mind absolutely requires _some_ religion on which to rest, they gave
their real devotion to all kinds of strange and foreign deities,--to
Isis and Osiris, and the dog Anubus, to Chaldaean magicians, to Jewish
exercisers, to Greek quacks, and to the wretched vagabond priests of
Cybele, who infested all the streets with their Oriental dances and