to surprise us that the emperor, as the depositary of this charmed power,
should have been looked upon as a _sacred_ person, and the imperial family
considered a "_divina_ domus." It is an error to regard this as excess of
adulation, or as built _originally_ upon hypocrisy. Undoubtedly the
expressions of this feeling are sometimes gross and overcharged, as we
find them in the very greatest of the Roman poets: for example, it shocks
us to find a fine writer in anticipating the future canonization of his
patron, and his instalment amongst the heavenly hosts, begging him to keep
his distance warily from this or that constellation, and to be cautious of
throwing his weight into either hemisphere, until the scale of proportions
were accurately adjusted. These doubtless are passages degrading alike to
the poet and his subject. But why? Not because they ascribe to the emperor
a sanctity which he had not in the minds of men universally, or which even
to the writer's feeling was exaggerated, but because it was expressed
coarsely, and as a _physical_ power: now, every thing physical is
measurable by weight, motion, and resistance; and is therefore definite.
But the very essence of whatsoever is supernatural lies in the indefinite.
That power, therefore, with which the minds of men invested the emperor,
was vulgarized by this coarse translation into the region of physics. Else
it is evident, that any power which, by standing above all human control,
occupies the next relation to superhuman modes of authority, must be
invested by all minds alike with some dim and undefined relation to the
sanctities of the next world. Thus, for instance, the Pope, as the father
of Catholic Christendom, could not _but_ be viewed with awe by any
Christian of deep feeling, as standing in some relation to the true and
unseen Father of the spiritual body. Nay, considering that even false
religions, as those of Pagan mythology, have probably never been utterly
stripped of all vestige of truth, but that every such mode of error has
perhaps been designed as a process, and adapted by Providence to the case
of those who were capable of admitting no more perfect shape of truth;