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 special limbo which the ignorant have reserved for all those who make them look foolish, for all that spells truth contrary to their own limited imaginings; if so, he would not have been unusual. The genius of natural religion is that it is comprehensive, tolerant, righteous, and just. The genius of dogmatic religion lies in the assumption to itself of absolute exclusiveness; it alone contains truth, and in its later editions, finality as well. Whether Antonine's form included this latter pretension we do not know, certainly it claimed what no Roman thinker could accord to any faith under the sun -- the proposition that God was one and God was supreme. The Roman had been bred on Pyrrho, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Cicero, and was more inclined to postulate that God was the cosmic entity of spirit, something as potent as, if not analagous to, the entity of electricity in modern science. He had no relations with the older deities who had made life terrible by their persecutions of the human race, and had no desire to submit himself again to a system which would erect fright into yet another national deity. He had long since grown weary of trying to propitiate infinity, and now understood that he might as well sacrifice to the animals in the Zoological Gardens, in the hope of staying their hunger, as make oblation to the deities in the expectation of a return in kind.

This was no new struggle that Antonine proposed to inaugurate in the city of Rome. It is the contest between rationalism and dogma when