Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

WHEN CHRIST APPEARED.19Eoman history, never mounted a chariot withoututtering certain words for good luck and preservationagainst calamity.16 We shall thereforejudge most inadequately of the force which theinnumerable rites, temples, festivals, pomps, ceremonies,prayers, invocations, priesthoods, sodalities,initiations, and mysteries of polytheism exercisedupon the minds of men, unless we take into fullaccount that remarkable sense of contact and sym-pathy between the external world and man-ofinvisible power betraying itself through palpableagents, whether in reasoning or unreasoning productions,whether in the animal or vegetableworld-which served as its basis. The line be-tween religion and superstition in paganism noeye can trace ; but at least the foundation of trueworship plunged deep out of sight into the secretrecesses of abj ect fear.4. But what was the moral influence of thismultiform, universal, all-embracing, and all-penetratingworship ?Varro, whom Cicero calls the most acute andlearned of writers, and whose great work in forty-one books he praises as containing the names, classes,offices, ' and causes of all divine and human things, O fdivided theology into the fabulous, the natural, andthe civil. In the first, he said, are many fictionsunworthy of the nature and dignity of immortal16 Merivale's History of the Romans, ii. 447