thousand fighting men, having at their head a general like Moses, who, according to Flavius Josephus,* had already vanquished an army of Ethiopians, and even an army of serpents. Instead of taking this short and easy route, he conducts them from Rameses to Baal-Sephon, in an opposite direction, right into the middle of Egypt, due south. He crosses the sea; he marches for forty years in the most frightful desarts, where there is not a single spring of water, or a tree, or a cultivated field-nothing but sand and dreary rocks. It is evident that God alone could make the Jews, by a miracle, take this route, and support them there by a succession of miracles. The Jewish government therefore was then a true theocracy. Moses however was never pontiff, and Aaron, who was pontiff, was never chief nor legislator. After that time we do not find any pontiff governing. Joshua, Jephtha, Samson, and the other chiefs of the people, except Elias and Samuel, were not priests. The Jewish republic, reduced to slavery so often, was anarchical rather than theocratical. Under the kings of Judah and Israel, it was but a long succession of assassinations and civil wars. These horrors were interrupted only by the entire extinction of ten tribes, afterwards by the enslavement of two others, and by the destruction of the city amidst famine and pestilence. This was not then divine government. When the Jewish slaves returned to Jerusalem, they were subdued by the kings of Persia, by the conqueror Alexander and his successors. It appears that God did not then reign immediately over this nation, since a little before the invasion of Ålexander, the pontiff John assassinated the priest Jesus his brother in the temple of Jerusalem, as Solomon had assassinated his brother Adonijah on the altar. The government was still less theocratical when Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, employed many of *Josephus, book ii. chap. 5. the Jews to punish those whom he regarded as rebels.* He forbad them all, under pain of death, to circumcise their children;t he compelled them to sacrifice swine in their temple, to burn the gates, to destroy the altar; and the whole enclosure was filled with thorns and brambles. Matthias rose against him at the head of some citizens, but he was not king. His son, Judas Maccabeus, taken for the Messiah, perished after glorious struggles. To these bloody contests succeeded civil wars. The men of Jerusalem destroyed Samaria, which the Romans subsequently rebuilt under the name of Sebasta. In this chaos of revolutions, Aristobulus, of the race of the Maccabees, and son of a high-priest, made himself king, more than five hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem. He signalised his reign, like some Turkish sultans, by cutting his brother's throat, and causing his mother to be put to death. His successors followed his example, until the period when the Romans punished all these barbarians. Nothing in all this is theocratical. If anything affords an idea of theocracy, it must be granted that it is the papacy of Rome;t it never announces itself but in the name of God, and its subjects live in peace. For a long time Thibet enjoyed the same advantages under the grand lama; but that is a gross error striving to imitate a sublime truth. The first incas, by calling themselves descendants in a right line from the sun, established a theocracy; everything was done in the name of the sun. Theocracy ought to be universal; for every man, nied. * Book 7. † Book 9. "Rome encore aujourd'hui consacrant ces maximes, Joint le trône à l'autel par des nœuds legitimes." John George le Franc, bishop of Puy-en-Velay, pretends that this is reasoning badly: it is true the legitimate bonds may be de But he himself reasons very ill. He does not see that the pope can become a sovereign only by abusing his title of pastor, by changing his crook for a sceptre ;-or rather he chuses not to see it. In regard to the peace of the modern Romans, it is the tranquillity of apoplexy. whether a prince or a boatman, should obey the natural and eternal laws which God has given him. THEODOSIUS. EVERY prince who puts himself at the head of a party, and succeeds, is sure of being praised to all eternity, if the party lasts that time; and his adversaries may be assured that they will be treated by orators, poets, and preachers, as Titans who revolted against the gods. This is what happened to Octavius Augustus, when his good fortune made him defeat Brutus, Cassius, and Antony. It was the lot of Constantine, when Maxentius, the legitimate emperor, elected by the Roman senate and people, fell into the water and was drowned. Theodosius had the same advantage. Woe to the vanquished! blessed be the victorious!-that is the motto of mankind. Theodosius was a Spanish officer, the son of a Spanish soldier of fortune. As soon as he was emperor, he persecuted the anti-consubstantialists. Judge of the applauses, benedictions, and pompous eulogies, on the part of the consubstantialists! Their adversaries scarcely subsist any longer; their complaints and clamours against the tyranny of Theodosius have perished with them, and the predominant party still lavishes on this prince the epithets of pious, just, clement, wise, and great. One day this pious and clement prince, who loved money to distraction, proposed laying a very heavy tax upon the city of Antioch, then the finest of Asia Minor. The people, in despair, having demanded a slight diminution, and not being able to obtain it, went so far as to break some statues, among which was one of the soldier, the emperor's father. St. John Chrysostom, or golden mouth, the priest and flatterer of Theodosius, failed not to call this action a detestable sacrilege, since Theodosius was the image of God, and his father was almost as sacred as himself. But if this Spaniard resembled God, he should have remem bered that the Antiochians also resembled him, and that men formed after the exemplar of all the gods existed before emperors. Finxit in effigiem moderantûm cuncta deorum. Theodosius immediately sent a letter to the governor with an order to apply the torture to the principal images of God who had taken part in this passing sedition; to make them perish under blows received from cords terminated with leaden balls; to burn some, and deliver others up to the sword. This was executed with all the punctuality of a governor who did his duty like a christian, who paid his court well, and who would make his way there. The Orontes bore nothing but corpses to the sea for several days; after which his gracious imperial majesty pardoned the Antiochians with his usual clemency, and doubled the tax. How did the emperor Julian act in the same city, when he had received a more personal and injurious outrage? It was not a paltry statue of his father which they defaced, it was to himself that the Antiochians addressed themselves, and against whom they composed the most violent satires. The philosophical emperor answered them by a light and ingenious satire. He took from them neither their lives nor their purses, He contented himself with having more wit than they had. This is the man whom St. Gregory Nazianzen and Theodoret, who were not of his communion, dare to calumniate so far as to say, that he sacrificed women and children to the moon; whilst those who were of the communion of Theodosius have persisted to our days in copying one another, by saying in an hundred ways that Theodosius was the most virtuous of men, and by wishing to make him a saint. We know well enough what was the mildness of this saint in the massacre of fifteen thousand of his subjects at Thessalonica. His panegyrists reduce the number of the murdered to seven or eight thousand, which is a very small number to them; but they elevate to the sky the tender piety of this good prince, who deprived himself of mass as well as his accom plice, the detestable Rufinus. I confess once more, that it was a great expiation, a great act of devotion, the not going to mass; but it restores not life to fifteen thousand innocents, slain in cold blood by an abominable perfidy. If an heretic was stained with such a crime, with what pleasure would all historians turn their boasting against him! with what colours would they paint him in the pulpits and college decla mations! I will suppose that the prince of Parma entered Paris, after having forced our dear Henry IV. to raise the siege; I will suppose that Philip II. gave the throne of France to his catholic daughter, and to the young catholic duke of Guise; how many pens and voices would for ever have anathematised Henry IV. and the Salic law! They would be both forgotten, and the Guises would be the heroes of the state and religion. Thus it is-applaud the prosperous and fly the miserable! Et cole felices, miseros fuge. If Hugh Capet dispossess the legitimate heir of Charlemagne, he becomes the root of a race of heroes. If he fails, he may be treated as the brother of St. Louis since treated Conradin and the duke of Austria, and with much more reason. Pepin rebels, dethrones the Merovingian race, and shuts his king in a cloister; but if he succeeds not, he mounts the scaffold. If Clovis, the first king of Belgic Gaul, is beaten in his invasion, he runs the risk of being condemned to fangs of beasts, as one of his ancestors was by Constantine. Thus goes the world under the empire of fortune, which is nothing but necessity, insurmountable fatality. "Fortuna sævo læta negotio." She makes us blindly play her terrible game, and we never see beneath the cards. THEOLOGIAN. SECTION I. THE theologian knows perfectly that, according to St. Thomas, angels are corporeal with relation to God; VOL. VI. 2 A |