tion of Rhea Sylvia by the god Mars, an event from which their
ancestors had deduced with pride the celestial origin of the founder of
their city, had dwindled into a myth; as a source of actual reliance and
trust, the intercession of Venus, that emblem of female loveliness, with
the father of the gods in behalf of her human favourites, was abandoned;
the Sibylline books, once believed to contain all that was necessary for
the prosperity of the republic, were suspected of an origin more
sinister than celestial; nor were insinuations wanting that from time to
time they had been tampered with to suit the expediency of passing
interests, or even that the true ones were lost and forgeries put in
their stead. The Greek mythology was to them, as it is to us, an object
of reverence, not because of any inherent truth, but because of the
exquisite embodiments it can yield in poetry, in painting, in marble.
The existence of those illustrious men who, on account of their useful
lives or excellent example, had, by the pious ages of old, been
sanctified or even deified, was denied, or, if admitted, they were
regarded as the exaggerations of dark and barbarous times. It was thus
with Aesculapius, Bacchus, and Hercules. And as to the various forms of
worship, the multitude of sects into which the pagan nations were broken
up offered themselves as a spectacle of imbecile and inconsistent
devotion altogether unworthy of attention, except so far as they might
be of use to the interests of the state.

[Sidenote: Their irresolution.]

Such was the position of things among the educated. In one sense they
had passed into liberty, in another they were in bondage. Their
indisposition to encounter those inflictions with which their illiterate
contemporaries might visit them may seem to us surprizing: they acted as
if they thought that the public was a wild beast that would bite if
awakened too abruptly from its dream; but their pusillanimity, at the
most, could only postpone for a little an inevitable day. The ignorant
classes, whom they had so much feared, awoke in due season
spontaneously, and saw in the clear light how matters stood.

[Sidenote: Surrender of affairs in the illiterate classes,]

[Sidenote: and consequent debasement of Christianity in Rome.]

Of the Roman emperors there were some whose intellectual endowments were
of the highest kind; yet, though it must have been plain to them, as to
all who turned their attention to the