to be
unsettled by every pretence or encouragement to innovation. The reigning
emperors, therefore, were desirous to place a check upon the mathematics
(as they termed the art of divination), much more for a political than a
religious cause, since we observe, in the history of the empire, how
often the dethronement or death of the sovereign was produced by
conspiracies or mutinies which took their rise from pretended
prophecies. In this mode of viewing the crime, the lawyers of the lower
empire acted upon the example of those who had compiled the laws of the
twelve tables.[12] The mistaken and misplaced devotion which Horace
recommends to the rural nymph, Phidyle, would have been a crime of a
deep dye in a Christian convert, and must have subjected him to
excommunication, as one relapsed to the rites of paganism; but he might
indulge his superstition by supposing that though he must not worship
Pan or Ceres as gods, he was at liberty to fear them in their new
capacity of fiends. Some compromise between the fear and the conscience
of the new converts, at a time when the church no longer consisted
exclusively of saints, martyrs, and confessors, the disciples of
inspired Apostles, led them, and even their priestly guides, subject
like themselves to human passions and errors, to resort as a charm, if
not as an act of worship, to those sacrifices, words, and ritual, by
which the heathen, whom they had succeeded, pretended to arrest evil or
procure benefits.

[Footnote 12: By this more ancient code, the punishment of death was
indeed denounced against those who destroyed crops, awakened storms, or
brought over to their barns and garners the fruits of the earth; but, by
good fortune, it left the agriculturists of the period at liberty to use
the means they thought most proper to render their fields fertile and
plentiful. Pliny informs us that one Caius Furius Cresinus, a Roman of
mean estate, raised larger crops from a small field than his neighbours
could obtain from more ample possessions. He was brought before the
judge upon a charge averring that he conjured the fruits of the earth,
produced by his neighbours' farms, into his own possession. Cresinus
appeared, and, having proved the return of his farm to be the produce of
his own hard and unremitting labour, as well as superior skill, was
dismissed with the highest honours.]

When such belief in a hostile principle and its imaginations was become
general in the Roman em