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"Deus stetit in synagoga deorum: in medio autem Deus dijudicat " chanted strong, nasal voices, issuing from the small window, which continued in full chorus one of the psalms, interrupted by blows of the hammer an infernal deed beating time to celestial songs. One might have supposed himself near a smithy, except that the blows were dull, and manifested to the ear that the anvil was a man's body.
One finds there almost every thing but religion. SEWARD. 'He speaks of his returning to it, in his Ode Parcus Deorum cultor et infrequens JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was not in earnest: this was merely poetical. BOSWELL. 'There are, I am afraid, many people who have no religion at all. SEWARD. 'And sensible people too. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, not sensible in that respect.
And I bring to my support the more liberal lexicography of science, whose spectroscopy now admits the humblest elements into the society of the stars; whose microscopy, as Maeterlinck has helped us to become aware, has permitted the flowers to share the aspirations of animal intelligence; whose chemistry has gathered the elements into a social democracy in which no permanent aristocracy seems now to be possible, except that of service to man; whose physics has divided the atom and yet exalted it to a place which would lead Lucretius, were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum instead of Natura Rerum.
The happy man who first thought to put the De Natura Deorum and the De Amicitia into boards together, and to present them to the world under the name of his philosophy, perhaps found the only title that could unite the two.
They did him good, in the same way that the making of many shoes would have done him good had he been a shoemaker. In catching fishes and riding after foxes he could not give his mind to the occupation, so as to abstract his thoughts. But Cicero's de Natura Deorum was more effectual.
There cannot a worse state of things be imagined than where wickedness comes to be legitimate, and assumes, with the magistrates' permission, the cloak of virtue: "Nihil in speciem fallacius, quam prava religio, ubi deorum numen prxtenditur sceleribus." The extremest sort of injustice, according to Plato, is where that which is unjust should be reputed for just.
"Omnia fanda, nefanda, malo permista furore, Justificam nobis mentem avertere deorum."
Among ancient testimonies, one of the most interesting is that afforded by Cicero in his de Natura Deorum.
Of these, the first three were intended as a full exposition of the conflicting opinions entertained on their respective subjects; the De Fato, however, was not finished according to this plan. His treatise De Naturâ Deorum, in three books, may be reckoned the most splendid of all his works, and shows that neither age nor disappointment had done injury to the richness and vigour of his mind.
In addition to these, much that has come to us has been extracted, as it were unwillingly, from palimpsests, and is, from that and from other causes, fragmentary. We have indeed only fragments of the essays De Republica. De Legibus, De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, and De Fato, in addition to the Academica.
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