Men will never make up their minds to believe in the worthless-
ness of that which they passionately desire and covet, and the
aid of which seems indispensable to them. And this was the
case with divination. Heathendom was utterly without religious
teaching and teachers : no authority any where, only traditional
ceremonies and myths. The gods were boimd to speak, if men
were not to despair ; and as they did not do so through a doc-
trine revealed by a firmly-organised body of teachers, they ne-
cessarily did so by oracles and birds, liver or spleen of animal
victims, by dreams and stars, and any thing at all capable of
being moulded into a sign to which a meaning could be attached,
and by which hope or fear could be fed.
Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus, though so opposed in other
respects, both agree in their testimony that divination was uni-
versally honoured as a divine and infallible science.^ To recom-
mend and corroborate this view of divination, Celsus adds that
it was borrowed firom the beasts, which, as being endowed with
a higher intelligence, had a foreknowledge of the future, and
were more pleasing to the deity, with whom they stood in closer
relations than man.^ That sober investigator of nature, Ga-
len, was himself an apologist for the possibility of predictions
from the position of stars, the flight of birds, and the like.^ In
fact, the dominance of this error was a general yoke pressing on
the men of that day, from which but very few were ever able to
escape, and which formed a main support of the religion and
worship of the gods. Cicero eloquently describes this thraldom.
* Plut de Fato, p. 574 ; Sext. Emp. c. Mathem. ix. 132.
