Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

18 THE GODS OF THE NATIONSwere filled with these things. Scarcely a philosopher,scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler canbe found whose niind, even if proof against agenuine devotion to a divine providence, 'was notopen to one or more manifestations of the darkmysterious power pressing upon the confines ofhuman life, and every now and then breakingthrough the veil of visible things with evidencesof malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulousconqueror than Sylla, a more genuinephilosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacioususer of religion than Augustus, we shall noteasily find; yet each of these, like their ordinarycountrymen, had this sense of the supernaturaland intangible above, beneath, and around them.Sylla, on the eve of any battle, would, in thesight of his soldiers, embrace a small statue ofApollo, which he had taken from Delphi, and entreatit to give an early fulfilment of its promises.15Marcus Aurelius, in his war with theMarcomanni, collected priests from all quarters toRome, and was so long occupied in offering ritesto their various foreign gods that he kept hisarmy waiting for him. And Augustus watchedcarefully the most trivial signs, and was distressedthe morning his left shoe was iven to himfor his right. Even that Julius before whosegenius all men quailed, and whose disbelief of afuture state stands recorded at a notable point of"15 Valerius Max. i. c. 2, 3.