be discovered in the principles of these persons, but “a bad and excessive superstition,” accompanied, it seems, with an oath or mutual federation, “to allow themselves in no crime or immoral conduct whatever.”  The truth is, the ancient heathens considered religion entirely as an affair of state, as much under the tuition of the magistrate as any other part of the police.  The religion of that age was not merely allied to the state; it was incorporated into it.  Many of its offices were administered by the magistrate.  Its titles of pontiffs, augurs, and flamens, were borne by senators, consuls, and generals.  Without discussing, therefore, the truth of the theology, they resented every affront put upon the established worship, as a direct opposition to the authority of government.

Add to which, that the religious systems of those times, however ill supported by evidence, had been long established.  The ancient religion of a country has always many votaries, and sometimes not the fewer, because its origin is hidden in remoteness and obscurity.  Men have a natural veneration for antiquity, especially in matters of religion.  What Tacitus says of the Jewish was more applicable to the heathen establishment:  “Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur.”  It was also a splendid and sumptuous worship.  It had its priesthood, its endowments, its temples.  Statuary, painting, architecture, and music, contributed their effect to its ornament and magnificence.  It abounded in festival shows and solemnities, to which the common people are greatly addicted, and which were of a nature to engage them much more than anything of that sort among us.  These things would retain great numbers on its side by the fascination of spectacle and pomp, as well as interest many in its preservation by the advantage which they drew from it.  “It was moreover interwoven,” as Mr. Gibbon rightly represents it, “with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life, with all the offices and amusements of society.”  On the due celebration also of its rites, the people were taught to believe, and did believe, that the prosperity of their country in a great measure depended.

I am willing to accept the account of the matter which is given by Mr. Gibbon:  “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful:”  and I would ask from which of these three classes of men were the Christian missionaries to look for protection or impunity?  Could they expect it from the people, “whose acknowledged confidence in the public religion” they subverted from its foundation?  From the philosopher, who, “considering all religious as equally false,” would of course rank theirs among the number, with the addition of regarding them as busy and troublesome zealots?  Or from the magistrate, who, satisfied with the “utility”