hope. It was this that made it possible for a great French critic to
assert that for those who have read Virgil there is nothing astonishing
in Christianity.[870] Let us try and realise what these writers mean.
The Scotsman is sober and earnest, the Frenchman epigrammatically
exaggerating; but the feeling that underlies both utterances is a true
one.

We have traced the gradual paralysis of the secularised State religion.
We have glanced at the two types of philosophical thought which took the
place of that religion in the minds of the cultivated section of Roman
society, neither of which could adequately supply the Roman and Italian
mind with an expression of its own natural feeling, never wholly
extinct, of its relation to the Power manifesting itself in the
universe. Stoicism came near to doing what was needed, by rehabilitating
itself on Italian soil and indulging Roman preconceptions of the divine;
but it could not greatly affect the mass of men, and its appeal was not
to feeling, but to reason. Epicurism, though perhaps more popular, was
in reality more in conflict with what was best in the Italian nature,
and the passionate appeal of Lucretius to look for comfort to a
scientific knowledge of the _rerum natura_ had no enduring power to
cheer. Lastly, we have examined the tendency of the same age towards
mysticism and Cicero's doubting and embarrassed expression of it, and we
found that this tendency rather illustrates a sense of something
wanting than hopefully satisfies it. We may well feel ourselves, now we
have arrived at the close of the Republican era, just as the best men of
that day felt, that there _is_ something wanting. In their minds this
feeling almost amounted to despair; in ours, as we read the story of the
troublous time after the death of Caesar, it is pity and wonder. There
was, in fact, more than a sense of weariness and discomfort, moral and
material, in the Roman mind of that generation--there was also what we
may almost call a sense of sin, such a feeling, though doubtless less
real and intense, as that which their prophets, from time to time, awoke
in the Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of Hellas. It
was essentially a feeling of neglected duty--of neglected duty to the
Power and of goodwill wanting towards men. Lucretius had been
unconsciously a powerful witness to this feeling, but had not found the
remedy. In the early Augustan age it is again expressed by Horace, by
Sal