tion to its public
ceremonies--and whose coins are remarkable for their reference to the
oldest and most hieratic types of Roman mythology. Aurelius had
succeeded in more than healing the old feud between philosophy and
religion, displaying himself, in singular combination, as at once the
most zealous of philosophers and the most devout of polytheists, and
lending himself, with an air of conviction, to all the pageantries of
public worship. To his pious recognition of that one orderly spirit,
which, according to the doctrine of the Stoics, diffuses itself through
the world, and animates it--a recognition taking the form, with him, of
a constant effort towards inward likeness thereto, in the harmonious
order of his own soul--he had added a warm personal devotion towards
the whole multitude of the old national gods, and a great many new
foreign ones besides, by him, at least, not ignobly conceived. If the
comparison may be reverently made, there was something here of the
method by which the catholic church has added the cultus of the saints
to its worship of the one Divine Being.

[183] And to the view of the majority, though the emperor, as the
personal centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting his
people to philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain public
discourses for their instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion was
his most striking feature. Philosophers, indeed, had, for the most
part, thought with Seneca, "that a man need not lift his hands to
heaven, nor ask the sacristan's leave to put his mouth to the ear of an
image, that his prayers might be heard the better."--Marcus Aurelius,
"a master in Israel," knew all that well enough. Yet his outward
devotion was much more than a concession to popular sentiment, or a
mere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with others, which had
made him again and again, under most difficult circumstances, an
excellent comrade. Those others, too!--amid all their ignorances, what
were they but instruments in the administration of the Divine Reason,
"from end to end sweetly and strongly disposing all things"? Meantime
"Philosophy" itself had assumed much of what we conceive to be the
religious character. It had even cultivated the habit, the power, of
"spiritual direction"; the troubled soul making recourse in its hour of
destitution, or amid the distractions of the world, to this or that
director--philosopho suo--who could really best underst