character, indisposed him to religious thoughts. Nay, it has been common
to class him amongst deliberate atheists; and some well known anecdotes
are current in books, which illustrate his contempt for the vulgar class
of auguries. In this, however, he went no farther than Cicero, and other
great contemporaries, who assuredly were no atheists. One mark perhaps of
the wide interval which, in Caesar's age, had begun to separate the Roman
nobility from the hungry and venal populace who were daily put up to sale,
and bought by the highest bidder, manifested itself in the increasing
disdain for the tastes and ruling sympathies of the lowest vulgar. No mob
could be more abjectly servile than was that of Rome to the superstition
of portents, prodigies, and omens. Thus far, in common with his order, and
in this sense, Julius Caesar was naturally a despiser of superstition. Mere
strength of understanding would, perhaps, have made him so in any age, and
apart from the circumstances of his personal history. This natural
tendency in him would doubtless receive a further bias in the same
direction from the office of Pontifex Maximus, which he held at an early
stage of his public career. This office, by letting him too much behind
the curtain, and exposing too entirely the base machinery of ropes and
pulleys, which sustained the miserable jugglery played off upon the
popular credulity, impressed him perhaps even unduly with contempt for
those who could be its dupes. And we may add--that Caesar was
constitutionally, as well as by accident of position, too much a man of
the world, had too powerful a leaning to the virtues of active life, was
governed by too partial a sympathy with the whole class of _active_ forces
in human nature, as contradistinguished from those which tend to
contemplative purposes, under any circumstances, to have become a profound
believer, or a steadfast reposer of his fears and anxieties, in religious
influences. A man of the world is but another designation for a man
indisposed to religious awe or contemplative enthusiasm. Still it is a
doctrine which we cherish--that grandeur of mind in any one department