And we may add--that Caesar was
constitutionally, as well as by accident of position, too much a man of
the world, had too powerful a leaning to the virtues of active life, was
governed by too partial a sympathy with the whole class of _active_ forces
in human nature, as contradistinguished from those which tend to
contemplative purposes, under any circumstances, to have become a profound
believer, or a steadfast reposer of his fears and anxieties, in religious
influences. A man of the world is but another designation for a man
indisposed to religious awe or contemplative enthusiasm. Still it is a
doctrine which we cherish--that grandeur of mind in any one department
whatsoever, supposing only that it exists in excess, disposes a man to
some degree of sympathy with all other grandeur, however alien in its
quality or different in its form. And upon this ground we presume the
great Dictator to have had an interest in religious themes by mere
compulsion of his own extraordinary elevation of mind, after making the
fullest allowance for the special quality of that mind, which did
certainly, to the whole extent of its characteristics, tend entirely to
estrange him from such themes.
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