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His friend Paganelli of Modena, who wrote a Latin poem on the Empire of Cupid, extolled the Governor of Reggio for ranking among the deity's most generous vassals, one who, in spite of his office of magistrate, looked with an indulgent eye on errors to which himself was liable, and who was accustomed to prefer the study of love-verses to that of the law.
Pending that day's arrival, they act as diplomatists, slowly carrying on their work of conquest as the Deity's functionaries; and religion is but the public homage which they pay to the Deity, and which they organise with all the pomp and magnificence that is likely to influence the multitude.
What then becomes of his cautious limitations, "The fact is yet a problem in philosophy." "The world possesses as yet no adequate logic for that province of speculation" "Men must die to solve the problem of Deity's existence?" Is it still a problem, and one, too, which may after all be solved, and solved even in the affirmative?
The anger of the god prompted both the individual and the nation to greater zeal in securing the deity's love. To an even greater extent than in the hymns is the element of love introduced into the penitential psalms, and when not directly expressed, is so clearly implied as to form the necessary complement to the conception of the divine wrath.
Pending that day's arrival, they act as diplomatists, slowly carrying on their work of conquest as the Deity's functionaries; and religion is but the public homage which they pay to the Deity, and which they organise with all the pomp and magnificence that is likely to influence the multitude.
That is their motto, their battle-cry, and thence springs the moral principle which many regard as their crime: that all means are good to attain one's end, especially when that end is the furtherance of the Deity's interests as represented by those of the Church.
Not unfamiliar with the history of the temporal reign of the Popes of the middle ages, I could readily comprehend the practical efficiency of such a mixture of religious faith with the affairs of earth. For the God of the German theology exacted no spiritual worship of his people, but only a very temporal service to the deity's earthly incarnation in the form of the House of Hohenzollern.
Artaxerxes represents himself as receiving the Persian diadem from the hands of Ormazd; both he and the god are mounted upon chargers of a stout breed, which are spiritedly portrayed; Artabanus lies prostrate under the feet of the king's steed, while under those of the deity's we observe the form of Ahriman, also prostrate, and indeed seemingly dead.
In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not complete until he had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to translate entrails. Caesar Augustus's education received this final polish. All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.
If, however, it be objected that this hypothesis leaves unexplained the fetters upon the good Being's power, the answer is obvious; it leaves those fetters not at all less explained than the Manichean theory does; for that theory gives no explanation of the existence of a counteracting principle, and it assumes both an antagonistic power, to limit the Deity's power, and a malevolent principle to set the antagonistic power in motion; whereas our supposition assumes no malevolence at all, but only a restraint upon the divine power.
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