Yet his outward devotion was much more than a concession to popular sentiment, or a mere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with others, which had made him again and again, under most difficult circumstances, an excellent comrade.

Those others, too!--amid all their ignorances, what were they but instruments in the administration of the Divine Reason, "from end to end sweetly and strongly disposing all things"?
Meantime "Philosophy" itself had assumed much of what we conceive to be the religious character.

It had even cultivated the habit, the power, of "spiritual direction"; the troubled soul making recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid the distractions of the world, to this or that director--philosopho suo--who could really best understand it.
And it had been in vain that the old, grave [184] and discreet religion of Rome had set itself, according to its proper genius, to prevent or subdue all trouble and disturbance in men's souls.

In religion, as in other matters, plebeians, as such, had a taste for movement, for revolution; and it had been ever in the most populous quarters that religious changes began.

To the apparatus of foreign religion, above all, recourse had been made in times of public disquietude or sudden terror; and in those great religious celebrations, before his proceeding against the barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time of Augustus, making no secret of his worship of that goddess, though her temple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign of Tiberius.