of the later Greek philosophy had in them, in truth, the germ of a
sort of austerely opinionative "natural theology," and how often has
that led to religious dryness--a hard contempt of everything in
religion, which touches the senses, or charms the fancy, or really
concerns the affections. Aurelius had made his own the secret of
passing, naturally, and with no violence to his thought, to and fro,
between the richly coloured and romantic religion of those old gods
who had still been human beings, and a very abstract speculation upon
the impassive, [42] universal soul--that circle whose centre is
everywhere, the circumference nowhere--of which a series of purely
logical necessities had evolved the formula. As in many another
instance, those traditional pieties of the place and the hour had
been derived by him from his mother:--para tes metros to theosebes.+
Purified, as all such religion of concrete time and place needs to
be, by frequent confronting with the ideal of godhead as revealed to
that innate religious sense in the possession of which Aurelius
differed from the people around him, it was the ground of many a
sociability with their simpler souls, and for himself, certainly, a
consolation, whenever the wings of his own soul flagged in the trying
atmosphere of purely intellectual vision. A host of companions,
guides, helpers, about him from of old time, "the very court and
company of heaven," objects for him of personal reverence and
affection--the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods
determined the character of much of his daily life, and might prove
the last stay of human nature at its weakest. "In every time and
place," he had said, "it rests with thyself to use the event of the
hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods." And when he said
"Worship the gods!" he did it, as strenuously as everything else.

Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or