The Caesars | Page 5

soldiery perishing on
either side, didst bewail, amongst thy spectacles of domestic woe, the

luminaries of thy senate extinguished, the heads of thy consuls fixed
upon a halberd, weeping for ages over thy self- slaughtered Catos, thy
headless Ciceros (_truncosque Cicerones_), and unburied Pompeys;--to
whom the party madness of thy own children had wrought in every age
heavier woe than the Carthaginian thundering at thy gates, or the Gaul
admitted within thy walls; on whom OEmathia, more fatal than the day
of Allia,--Collina, more dismal than Cannæ,--had inflicted such deep
memorials of wounds, that, from bitter experience of thy own valor, no
enemy was to thee so formidable as thyself;--thou, Rome! didst now for
the first time behold a civil war issuing in a hallowed prosperity, a
soldiery appeased, recovered Italy, and for thyself liberty established.
Now first in thy long annals thou didst rest from a civil war in such a
peace, that righteously, and with maternal tenderness, thou mightst
claim for it the honors of a civic triumph."]
--"God and his Son except, Created thing nought valued she nor
shunned."
That the possessor and wielder of such enormous power--power alike
admirable for its extent, for its intensity, and for its consecration from
all counterforces which could restrain it, or endanger it--should be
regarded as sharing in the attributes of supernatural beings, is no more
than might naturally be expected. All other known power in human
hands has either been extensive, but wanting in intensity--or intense,
but wanting in extent--or, thirdly, liable to permanent control and
hazard from some antagonist power commensurate with itself. But the
Roman power, in its centuries of grandeur, involved every mode of
strength, with absolute immunity from all kinds and degrees of
weakness. It ought not, therefore, to surprise us that the emperor, as the
depositary of this charmed power, should have been looked upon as a
sacred person, and the imperial family considered a "divina domus." It
is an error to regard this as excess of adulation, or as built originally
upon hypocrisy. Undoubtedly the expressions of this feeling are
sometimes gross and overcharged, as we find them in the very greatest
of the Roman poets: for example, it shocks us to find a fine writer in
anticipating the future canonization of his patron, and his instalment
amongst the heavenly hosts, begging him to keep his distance warily

from this or that constellation, and to be cautious of throwing his
weight into either hemisphere, until the scale of proportions were
accurately adjusted. These doubtless are passages degrading alike to the
poet and his subject. But why? Not because they ascribe to the emperor
a sanctity which he had not in the minds of men universally, or which
even to the writer's feeling was exaggerated, but because it was
expressed coarsely, and as a physical power: now, every thing physical
is measurable by weight, motion, and resistance; and is therefore
definite. But the very essence of whatsoever is supernatural lies in the
indefinite. That power, therefore, with which the minds of men
invested the emperor, was vulgarized by this coarse translation into the
region of physics. Else it is evident, that any power which, by standing
above all human control, occupies the next relation to superhuman
modes of authority, must be invested by all minds alike with some dim
and undefined relation to the sanctities of the next world. Thus, for
instance, the Pope, as the father of Catholic Christendom, could not but
be viewed with awe by any Christian of deep feeling, as standing in
some relation to the true and unseen Father of the spiritual body. Nay,
considering that even false religions, as those of Pagan mythology,
have probably never been utterly stripped of all vestige of truth, but
that every such mode of error has perhaps been designed as a process,
and adapted by Providence to the case of those who were capable of
admitting no more perfect shape of truth; even the heads of such
superstitions (the Dalai Lama, for instance) may not unreasonably be
presumed as within the cognizance and special protection of Heaven.
Much more may this be supposed of him to whose care was confided
the weightier part of the human race; who had it in his power to
promote or to suspend the progress of human improvement; and of
whom, and the motions of whose will, the very prophets of Judea took
cognizance. No nation, and no king, was utterly divorced from the
councils of God. Palestine, as a central chamber of God's
administration, stood in some relation to all. It has been remarked, as a
mysterious and significant fact, that the founders of the great empires
all had some connection, more or less, with the temple of Jerusalem.
Melancthon even observes it in his Sketch of Universal