occasionally suffer from the partial abuse of delegated authority; but
the general principle of government was wise, simple, and beneficent.
They enjoyed the religion of their ancestors, whilst in civil honors and
advantages they were exalted, by just degrees, to an equality with their
conquerors.

I. The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned
religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened,
and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. 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 thus
toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious
concord.

The superstition of the people was not imbittered by any mixture of
theological rancor; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative
system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national
rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the
earth. Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular
disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the
articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The
thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not
discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes,
who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country,
were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally
confessed, that they deserved, if not the adoration, at least the
reverence, of all mankind. The deities of a thousand groves and a
thousand streams possessed, in peace, their local and respective
influence; nor could the Romans who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber,
deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius
of the Nile. The visible powers of nature, the planets, and the elements
were the same throughout the universe. The invisible governors of the
moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mould of fiction
and allegory. Every virtue, and even vice, acquired its divine
representative; every art and profession its patron, whose attributes,
in the most distant ages and countries, were uniformly derived from
the character of their peculiar votaries. A republic of gods of such
opposite tempers and interests required, in every system, the moderating
hand of a supr