fhipped, except the Roman gods and that the Roman gods were worshipped after no manner, but the established manner of the country*. But to come nearer to the times, of which you are writing, In Dion Caffius you may meet with a great courtier, one of the interior cabinet, and a polished statesman, in a fet fpeech, upon the most momentous fubject, expreffing himself to the Emperor, in a man-, ner agreeable enough to the practice of antiquity, but utterly inconfiftent with the most remote idea: of religious toleration. The speech alluded *Datum inde negotium ædilibus, ut animadverterent, ne qui, nifi Romani Dii, neu quo alio more, quam patrio cole rentur. Liv. L. iv. C. 30. alluded to, contains, I confess it, nothing more than the advice of an individual; but it ought to be remembered, that that individual was Mæcenas, that the advice was given to Auguftus, and that the occafion of giving it, was no lefs important than the fettling the form of the Roman government. He recommends it to Cæfar, to worship the gods himself, according to the established form; and to force all others to do the fame; and to hate and to punish all thofe, who fhould attempt to introduce foreign religions*: nay, he bids him in the то Ταυτα τε ούτω πραττε, και προσ μεν θείον πάντη πάντως αυτός τε σέβου, κατα τα πατρια, και τους αλλος τιμαν αναγκάζει τους δε δη ξενίζοντας τι περί αυτο και μίσει dag. Dion. Caf. L. 52. fame place, have an eye upon the philosophers also, so that free thinking, free speaking at least, upon religious matters, was not quite fo safe under the gentle sway of the Roman princes; as, thank God, it is under the much more gentle government of our own. In the Edict of Toleration published by Galerius after fix years unremitted perfecution of the Chriftians, we perceive his motive for perfecution, to have been the fame with that, which had influenced the conduct of the more antient Romans, an abhorrence of all innovations in religion. You have favoured us with the translation of this edict, in which he fays" we "were particularly defirous of re"claiming "claiming into the way of reafon "and nature," ad bonas mentes (a good pretence this for a Polytheiftic perfecutor) "the deluded Chri"ftians, who had renounced the "religion and ceremonies inftituted "by their fathers" - this is the precife language of Livy, defcribing a perfecution of a foreign religion three hundred years before, turba erat nec facrificantium nec precantium Deos patrio more. And the very expedient of forcing the Christians to deliver up their religious books, which was practifed in this perfecution, and which Mofheim attributes to the advice of Hierocles, and you to that of the philofophers of those times, feems clear to me, from the places in Livy, before quoted, to have been nothing but an old piece of ftate policy, to which the Romans had recourse, as often as they apprehended their established religion to be in any danger. In the preamble of the letter of toleration, which the emperor Maximin reluctantly wrote to Sabinus about a year after the publication of Galerius' Edict, there is a plain avowal of the reasons, which induced Galerius and Diocletian to com mence their their perfecution; they had feen the temples of the gods forfaken, and were determined by the feverity of punishment to reclaim men to their worship *. In Συνείδον σχεδον απαντας ανθρωπες, καλα λειφθεισης |