fice of the Mass, or how it differs from our own mode of celebrating the communion so as to render it superstitious and idolatrous ? We strongly suspect he knew little more himself. It is no great wonder that he imagined the Catholics in general were not against the Established Church. That they were not so he pledges himself over and over again. He repudiates the idea in the strongest terms. He declares, and we cannot doubt, sincerely, that if he believed that emancipation would in any way weaken the Establishment he would oppose it. He was confident that it would "rivet the honest Roman Catholic to the State by every good affection of his nature;" and these words, "to the State," he explains-“ I say to the State, because I trust that every man who hears me will say that to subvert the Protestant Establishment is to subvert the State." on We have marked many more passages to the same effect, if more had been needed. In the same speech he declares, behalf of the Roman Catholics, that any well-informed Roman Catholic knows that the Protestant religion of England and Ireland" "forms a part of the fundamental, unalterable law of the empire; " that he therefore prefers a Protestant Establishment and an unimpaired State, to a Roman Catholic Establishment and a subverted one; that he considers the possessions of the Protestant clergy as their absolute property, &c. There are those who complain of a change in the tone of the Catholics on this and other similar subjects. They should remember that those who advocated the cause of Catholics in those days were not Catholics, and could only imperfectly reflect their feelings and opinions. How would a Liberal member of Parliament in the present day succeed in explaining to the House of Commons the views and feelings, say, of a Ritualist? Next there can be no greater mistake than to attribute the present danger of the Irish Establishment to emancipation. It is plain that if, per impossibile, emancipation had never taken place, the animosity of Irish Catholics against it would have been a thousand times greater than it is or ever has been. So far we are sure that all Plunket's anticipations have been fulfilled. We could say much more on this subject, but our space warns us to conclude. We heartily thank Mr. Plunket for a very useful and interesting book, his own part of which does the highest credit both to his literary powers, his taste, and his political principles, and we trust that this will not be the last occasion on which he will give us the benefit of them. ART. IV. THE GODS OF THE NATIONS WHEN Heidenthum und Judenthum. Vorhalle zur Geschichte des Christenthums. Von J. J. T. DOLLINGER. Regensburg. 1857. NDER the sceptre of the imperial unity were brought together a hundred different lands occupied by as many different races. That rule of Rome which had grown for many centuries without, as it seemed, any presiding thought, by the casual accretions of conquest, may be said to assume under the hands of Augustus, about the year of Rome 750, certain definite and deliberately chosen limits, and to be governed by a fixed Idea, more and more developed in the imperial policy. The limits which the most fortunate of Roman emperors, nay the creator of the empire itself, put to it, were the Rhine and Danube, with the Euxine Sea, on the north; the deserts of Africa on the south; the Euphrates on the east; the ocean on the west. The Idea, which may indeed have been conceived by Julius, but was certainly first embodied by Augustus, was to change the constitution of a conquering city, ruled by an aristocratic senate, into a commonwealth governed by one man, the representative of the whole people; and the effect of this change, an effect no doubt unforeseen, at least in its extent, by its framer, was gradually to absorb the manifold races inhabiting these vast regions into the majesty of the Roman law, order, and citizenship. The three centuries which follow Augustus, are occupied in working out the drama of this unity. During this time, the provinces appear to come out more and more as parts of one whole. Some which at its commencement had only just entered the circle of Roman power and thought, as Gaul, become entirely interpenetrated with the law, language, customs, and civilization of the sovereign city. Spain was nearly as much, and northern Africa perhaps even more Latinized: in all, local inequalities, and the dissimilarity arising from conflicting races, customs, and languages, are more and more softened down, though never entirely removed; and while throughout this period the great city continues the head, yet the body assumes an ever increasing importance, until at length its members engage the equal solicitude of that central potentate to whom all equally belong. In the times of so-called Roman liberty, the plunder of lands which received pro-consuls for their annual rulers, served to replenish the fortunes of nobles exhausted by the corruption requisite to gain high office; but if the dominion of one at Rome seemed an evil exchange to a nobility which deemed itself born to enjoy a conquered world, at least it served as a protection to those many millions for whom the equality of law and order, the fair administration of justice, and the undisturbed possession of property, constituted the chief goods of life. Cicero and his peers might grieve over the extinction of what they termed liberty, but Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia exulted in deliverance from the oppression of a Verres, a Fonteius, a Gabinius, a Piso, or a Clodius, in the communication of citizenship, and in the peace of a common civilization. I. With a passing glance at the progress of this unity, which, great and magnificent as it is, is yet external, let us turn to an object filling the whole of this vast empire with its varied manifestations: for this object leads us to the consideration of another unity, wholly internal, without which that of government, law, and order must be apparent rather than real, or at best, however seemingly imposing, be deprived of the greater part of its efficacy. 1. It has been said that the empire contained in it many lands and many races, but these likewise worshipped their own distinct gods, which were acknowledged and sanctioned as national divinities for the several countries wherein they were locally established. Had Augustus ordered an enrolment not only of the numbers, the landed property, and the wealth of his subjects, but of their gods, his public register, or Breviarium, would have included at least ten distinct systems of idolatrous worship. First of all, there would be the proper gods of Rome, then those of the Hellenic race; and these, though the most similar to each other, yet refused a complete amalgamation. But besides these there were on the west the Etrurian, the Iberian, the Gallic, and the Germanic gods; on the east, the Carian and Phrygian, the Syrian, the Assyrian, the Arabian; on the south, the Phoenician, Libyan, and Egyptian. All these different races, inasmuch as they were subjects of the empire, enjoyed undisturbed the right of worshipping their ancestral gods,* who, so long as they did not * Tertull. Apolog. xxiv. "Ideo et Ægyptiis permissa est tam vanæ superstitionis potestas, avibus et bestiis consecrandis, et capite damnandis qui aliquem hujusmodi Deum occiderint. Unicuique etiam provinciæ et civitati suus Deus est, ut Syriæ Astartes, ut Arabiæ Disares, ut Noricis Belenus, ut Africæ Cælestis, ut Mauritaniæ Reguli sui," &c. ; and Minucius Felix, Octavius vi. in like manner. VOL. IX.—NO. XVII. [New Series.] G dedicated to Athene: whilst as "Olympian," he had the colossal temple begun by Peisistratus and finished after many hundred years by Hadrian, and as "guardian of the city distinct festivals. Yet more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic, the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street, irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city's darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself with a single altar in his rival's city, and with games in its harbour; but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus, while the Asiatic mother of the gods had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides, there was the worship of the hours and the graces, of Ilithyia, goddess of victory and of birth; of Esculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes, the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis. Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere widely honoured as a god.* Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to fill the year's cycle with their rites. The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty. or with reverential devotion to those whom |