Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/324

 political greatness was now robbing men of every liberating interest, was leaving society sterile and empty. As a consequence of this, each generation was becoming less wishful to think, and less capable of thought; not that the intellect of Rome had by any means descended to that ultimate plane of intelligence from which it was ready to enslave itself under the retrograde tendencies of Eastern theistic beliefs. Rome, the mistress of the world, had seen good in all Gods; she had acknowledged and included in her worship the philosophies and deities of all nations, tribes, and tongues; every force, natural, physical, and political, was represented at her altars. Rome was comprehensively, sceptically Polytheist, when to her palaces flocked the engineers, astronomers, and philosophers of that vast empire. It was only to the common people, possessed as they were by beliefs in non-human powers, in beings that beset life with malignity, that the restoration of cults and ritual commended itself, and even they were eclectic in their tastes and fancies.

Despite pulpit learning, we know that Rome was no more attracted by those doctrines of the universal socialistic brotherhood which had emanated from Nazareth, than she was by the system of the ecstatic visionary from Tarsus, who was destined -- by a more systematic and regular development of his revelations -- to capture the freedom of the earlier intellectual religions, as soon as the world's hoary wisdom, having lost its virility, was involved in the dotage of an unreasoning antiquity.

In the long run we know that the mob triumphed,