688 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



priests of Vespasian or Marcus Aurelius.&quot; &quot;The statues 

 of the emperors were real idols, to which they offered 

 incense, victims, and prayers.&quot; And how natural to other 

 European peoples in those days were conceptions leading 

 to such cults, is curiously shown by an incident in the 

 campaign of Tiberius, then a prince, carried on in Germany 

 in A.D. 5, when Komans and Teutons were on opposite sides 

 of the Elbe. 



&quot;One of the barbarians, an aged man, powerfully built and, to 

 judge from his attire, of high rank, got into an excavated trunk (such 

 as they use for boats) and rowed his vessel to the middle of the river. 

 There he asked and obtained leave to come safely to our side and 

 to see the prince. Having come to shore, he first for a long time 

 silently looked at the prince and finally broke out into these words : 

 1 Mad, indeed, are our young men. For if you are far, they worship 

 you as gods, and if you approach, they rather fear your weapons than 

 do you homage. But I, by thy kind permission, prince, to day have 

 seen the gods of whom before I had heard.&quot; 



That some of our own ancestors regarded gods simply as 

 superior men is also clear. If the Norseman &quot; thought 

 himself unfairly treated, even by his gods, he openly took 

 them to task and forsook their worship;&quot; and, reminding 

 us of some existing savages, we read of a Norse warrior 

 &quot; wishing ardently that he could but meet with Odin, that 

 he might attack him.&quot; 



As, in primitive thought, divinity is thus synonymous 

 with superiority ; and as at first a god may be either a 

 powerful living person (commonly of conquering race) or 

 a dead person who has acquired supernatural power as a 

 ghost; there come two origins for semi-divine beings the 

 one by unions between the conquering god-race and the 

 conquered race distinguished as men, and the other by 

 supposed intercourse between living persons and spirits. 

 We have seen that dream-life in general is at first undistin 

 guished from waking life. And if the events of ordinary 

 dreams are regarded as real, we may infer that the conco 

 mitants of dreams of a certain kind create a specially strong 

 belief in their reality. Once having become established in 



