IT is not unfitting that a study of Divination in its bearing on the providential order should form the sequel to our discussion of the opinions of the Stoics on the same theme. For the philosophers of the porch took a prominent place among the defenders of the reality of divination, and of its importance as a manifestation of the divine care for men. Zeno, as we learn from Cicero, sowed the seeds of the doctrine, Cleanthes adding somewhat to the store of seminal utterances, while the third of the great founders, Chrysippus, dealt with the subject in a more elaborate manner in two books, adding another on oracles, and a fourth on dreams. The tenets of these masters became the orthodox tradition of the school, which was followed without dissent till Panætius, who introduced the Stoic philosophy to the knowledge of the Romans, about a century and a half before the Christian era, ventured to hint a modest doubt far from welcome to other members of the sect.1 It happens, however, that, while few of the Stoics called in question the accepted doctrine on divination, some of them have bequeathed to us sayings which, possibly without any intention on their part, can be used with effect in undermining that very faith in the diviner's art which the originators of the school had made it their business to propagate. On this ground also it is suitable that the topic should be taken up at this stage.

The stoic interest in divination was mixed up with the general conceptions of the concerning God and Providence. The three topics—God, Providence, and Divination—formed a closely connected group in their minds. Belief in any one of the three was held to imply belief in the rest, so that each of them in turn, assumed as admitted, might be used to prove the others. According to the purpose in view it was argued now, if there be anything in divination then there are gods; and at another time, if there be gods then divination must be a reality. Cicero has given us in short compass the logic of the Stoics in plying the latter of these two complementary arguments. It is as follows. ‘If there be gods, and yet they do not make known to men beforehand the things which are to come to pass, either they do not love men, or they do not know that is going to happen, or they think that men have no interest in knowing what is going to happen, or they think it beneath their dignity to reveal the future, or such revelation is beyond their power. But they do love us, for they are beneficent, and friendly to the human race: they are not ignorant of things which they themselves have ordained; it is our interest to know what is going to happen, for we will be more cautious if we know; the gods do not account revelation of the future beneath their dignity, for nothing is more becoming than beneficence; and it is in their power to know the future. Therefore it cannot be affirmed that gods exist, yet do not by signs reveal the future. But there are gods, therefore they give signs. But if they give signs they must also put within men's reach the science of their interpretation, for the one without the other would be useless. But this science is divination. Therefore divination is a reality.’2 Thus reasoned Chrysippus, Diogenes, and Antipater; acutely if not irrefutably.

Belief in divination was not the monopoly of a school or a nation, but a common feature of all ancient ethnic religion. ‘What king,’ asks the apologist of the belief in Cicero's treatise, ‘what king ever was there, what people, that did not employ the diviner's art?’3 That art had great vogue, especially in Greece and Rome. The fact, it has been suggested, is to be accounted for by the consideration that these energetic peoples naturally found the chief interest of religion in its bearing on this life.4 But this remark holds true not merely in reference to the Greeks and Romans; it applies to pagans generally. Absorbing concern for the temporal is a characteristic of all peoples in a rudimentary moral condition. ‘After all these things do the Gentiles seek.’ Their very prayers are for material benefits, as one can see in the Vedic hymns. The summum bonum of crude religions consists in the gifts of fortune. And wherever these gifts are chiefly sought after, the arts of divination will flourish. Who will show us any good in store for us in the future? is the question on the lips of many, and wherever keen curiosity as to the secrets of to-morrow prevails, there will always be men offering themselves who profess ability to meet the demand, by drawing aside the veil of mystery which hides things to come from human eyes.

Divination may be regarded as a primitive form of revelation, and when placed under this category it gains in dignity. Nothing can be more natural, rational, and praiseworthy, on the part of beings endowed with reason, than the desire to know God. Show me Thy glory, show me Thy ways, show me Thy will, are prayers of which not even the wisest and most saintly have cause to be ashamed. What is there better worth knowing than the nature, thoughts, purposes of the great mysterious Being who made and sustains this world? But all depends on the kind of knowledge sought. There are two kinds of knowledge which a son may desire to have concerning his father. He may wish to know his father's thoughts about right and wrong, what he approves and what he disapproves, what he loves and admires, and what he hates and despises, that he may order his own life so as to win the commendation of one whom he instinctively reveres. Or he may wish to know how much his father is worth, and what share of his fortune will fall to his own portion by his will when he dies, and to what extent a life of pleasure will thus be put within his reach in the years to come. The one kind of knowledge is the desire of a noble-minded son, the other of a son the reverse of noble-minded. Equally diverse in character may be the revelations men seek concerning God. The devout wish of one man may be simply to know God's spirit, His thoughts towards men, whether they be gracious or the reverse, to be assured of His goodwill, and to be informed as to the kind of conduct that pleases Him. With this knowledge he will be content, living a life of trust and obedience, and for the rest leaving his times, his whole future, in God's hands, without curiosity or care as to what to-morrow may bring. The eager desire of another man may be to obtain just that kind of knowledge concerning God's purposes about which the first-named person is wholly indifferent, detailed information as to coming events in his future experience: when he is to die, how and where, the ups and downs in his way of life, the good and evil, fortune and misfortune, in his lot. The first kind of knowledge alone deserves the name of revelation. It is ethical in character, and it makes for a life of righteousness and wisdom. The second kind of knowledge, if attainable, is of no moral value, and bears no worthy fruit in conduct. The desire for it has its root in secularity of mind, and the real or imaginary gratification of it can only tend to a more abject bondage to the secular spirit.

The agent of revelation in connection with the higher kind of knowledge above described is the prophet, in connection with the lower the diviner or soothsayer. The characters of the two types of agents are as diverse as their occupations. The prophet is a man of simple, pure, unworldly spirit. He has a consuming passion for truth. His one desire is to know God as manifested in the world He has made, and in the history of mankind, and with absolute sincerity and unreserve to make known to others the vision he has seen. He has also a passion for righteousness as, in his judgment, the highest interest of life, and he makes it his business to preach the great doctrine that a people doing justly must prosper, has nothing to fear from the future, can defy all adverse fortune. But the diviner: what sort of a man is he? By the impartial testimony of history, a repulsive combination of superstition, greed, fraud, pretension, and ambition. Anything but a simple-minded man is the soothsayer; rather is he dark, enigmatical, inscrutable. ‘Worthless, and full of falsehood are the utterances of soothsayers,’ asserts vehemently Euripides.5 ‘The whole tribe of diviners are covetous,’6 declares, with no less emphasis, Sophocles. With this scorn and contempt of the Greek tragedians harmonises the tone in which Hebrew prophets ever speak of the fortune-telling tribe in their Semitic world.

Yet we must not judge of all who, in primitive times, believed in and practised divination, by the depraved character of the professional diviner of a later age. The two kinds of knowledge above contrasted might be combined as objects of desire in the religious consciousness, and both might be sought in perfect simplicity of heart. Why should not God communicate both to them that loved Him; reveal to them the law of duty as summed up in the Decalogue, and make known also the good and evil that were to befall them in the future? The law of chastity was written on the heart of Joseph, as his behaviour in the house of Potiphar attests. He feared God from his youth, and set moral duty above all considerations of advantage. But Joseph was also a dreamer of dreams, which he regarded as divine intimations of coming events in his own life; and he was an interpreter of the dreams of others, in which he found pre-intimations of years of plenty and of famine in the near future of the land of Egypt. Joseph had the prophet's love of righteousness, yet he could divine. In those simple times men would view his divining talent as the natural result of his righteousness. To whom should the secret of the Lord be revealed but to them that feared Him, to a Joseph or to a Daniel? The Stoics said that the wise man alone can divine.7 That sentiment was a survival of the feeling of far back antiquity. In the mouth of the Stoics it seems an anachronism, for by their time it had been made manifest that the ways of the diviner and the ways of wisdom and goodness were apt to lie far apart, and that lovers of wisdom, like Sophocles and Euripides, were inclined to show their bias by expressing abhorrence for the diviner's character, and their unbelief in the value of his pretended revelations. But in claiming the diviner's vocation for the wise, the Stoics were simply repeating the verdict of the tragic poets in a different form. They acknowledged the degeneracy, but refused to despair of the art. They aimed at reform rather than destruction. ‘Divination,’ they said in effect, ‘is a sorry business as actually practised, but put it into the hands of the wise man and all will be well.’ Perhaps so, but what if the wise man declined the honour? That is what we should expect from the wise man as conceived by the Stoics.

The media of revelation at the diviner's disposal were manifold. He could range over the wide region of the fortuitous, the unusual, and the marvellous, assumed to be specially significant. Whatever in the heavens or the earth, or beneath the earth, or in the aërial spaces, was fitted to arrest attention or awaken the sense of mystery and awe, might be expected to yield significant omens to those who had the eye to see and the ear to hear. The whole world was full of signs, hinting meanings bearing on the fortunes of men, and revealing to those who could understand the secrets of the past and the present, and above all of the future. There were signs in the stars, in the thunder-storm, in the flight and song of birds, in the murmur of the wind among the leaves of an oak-tree, in the livers of sacrificial victims, in the visions of the dreamer, and in the utterances of madmen. The question was not, where could the voice of God be heard, but where could it not be heard? There was a plethora of revelation, and it was a matter of taste to which department in the ample compass of the soothsayer's art any one might devote himself. There was room and need for specialisation, that every sort of divination might have its experts. If one method of ascertaining the divine will went out of fashion, it did not greatly matter, another was sure to take its place. One people might learn from another. The Chaldæans were the masters of astrology. The Greeks had their far-famed Delphic oracle. The Etruscans were the inventors of fulgural divination and of haruspicy.

Among the most ancient and most interesting forms of divination was that of augury, which sought to ascertain the will of the gods by observing the flight and the song of birds. Its prevalence and popularity in Greece from an early period is attested by the fame of Tiresias and Calchas in mythological story, and by the use of the Greek name for a bird, opvis, in Athenian speech, as a generic name for all presages. The chief place among the birds of fate was assigned to the eagle, the vulture, the raven, and the crow; but before all to the high-flying birds of prey which appear to reach heaven.8 These messengers of Zeus, on whose cries and movements so much was believed to depend, filled the breasts of simple-minded beholders with superstitious awe. Even free-thinking philosophers, living after the commencement of the Christian era, like Celsus and Porphyry, ascribed to the eagle and other omen-bearing birds greater importance than to man. The feeling of more ancient times is happily reflected in the Ion of Euripides. The foundling of that name is temple-sweeper in the shrine of Apollo his father, at Delphi. One of his menial duties is to keep the birds from defiling the sacred edifice. But they come one after another; now an eagle, now a swan, now some other winged creature, from Mount Parnassus, or the Delian lake, or the banks of the Alpheus. Ion warns them off, bids them return to their accustomed haunts, even threatens them with an arrow from his bow. But he has not the courage to carry out his threat; boy though he be, he is restrained by religious awe. ‘I am afraid to kill you, who announce to mortals the messages of the gods.’9 Euripides had no faith in divination in any form, but augury had a romantic side which would appeal to him as a poet.

The same thing cannot be said of haruspicy, that form of divination which sought divine omens in the bowels of slaughtered animals. This contribution to the resources of the soothsayer's art is as unromantic and unpoetical, not to say repulsive, as can be conceived. One can with difficulty imagine a people like the Greeks adopting it, not to speak of originating it. Its proper home was among the Etruscans, but it soon migrated to Rome, where it found a congenial harbour among a prosaic, utilitarian race. Cicero, no believer in divination, thought the best way of making this art ridiculous was to tell the grotesque story of its discovery, which was to the following effect. A certain person named Tages suddenly arose in a deep-drawn furrow in a field which was being ploughed, and spoke to the ploughman. This Tages was described in the Etruscan books as a boy in face but with an old man's wisdom. The ploughman, amazed at the apparition, expressed his surprise with a shout which drew a crowd to the spot, to which the stranger with the boy's face and the old man's mind communicated the rudiments of the haruspicine art. What need, adds the narrator, of a Carneades or an Epicurus to refute such absurdities? Who can believe in a creature, call him god or man, ploughed up in a field?10 The conception is certainly grotesque enough, and it seems to imply a lurking feeling that the art which formed the subject of this strange being's course of instruction could never have entered into the mind of any ordinary human being. And yet, to do the Etruscans justice, it must be owned that if there was any reality in divination, and if the assumptions on which it rested had any validity, the inspection of entrails was just as natural, and rational, as any other divinatory practice. All who offered sacrifices to the gods had a vital interest in making sure that the victims would be acceptable, and so obtain the benefit sought. External qualities, such as freedom from blemish, or the possession of certain marks, could be ascertained while the animal was living, but the interior of the body could be inspected only after death.11 But why inspect the interior if the exterior was in order? Because it was one of the assumptions on which divination rested that the unusual was significant. Suppose, now, some peculiarity was discovered, possibly by accident, in the liver of a dead animal intended for sacrifice. How natural the thought: ‘This means something. What if a victim with this peculiarity were unacceptable to the deity we desire to propitiate? It may seem a small matter, but nothing is small in the ritual of sacrifice, on which so much depends.’ The moment these thoughts entered the mind of a priestly functionary the art of haruspicy was on the point of being born.

One would think that the stars were too far away to run any risk of falling within the diviner's cognisance. Yet astrology prevailed in the East generally, and especially in Chaldæa, and in Egypt, from a very early time. It spread to the West about the beginning of the Christian era, and, in spite of severe discouragement at the hands of the Imperial government, it steadily gained ground, until it finally eclipsed all other forms of divination, including haruspicy. Even since the era of modern science dawned, some distinguished students of nature have not been insensible to its fascinations. Nor, when we reflect on the matter, is this difficult to understand. The only postulate required to start the astrologer on his career is that the stars, fixed and wandering, like the sun and moon, are there for the service of man. The service rendered by the sun is immense. His light and heat are the life of the world. The moon is emphatically the lesser light, yet she does in a humbler way for the night what the sun does more perfectly for the day: yields light to guide the path of men. What then is the function of the stars, so multitudinous in number? The light they give, notwithstanding their vast number, is insignificant; they must therefore have been set in the sky for some other purpose than that of illumination. Or rather, may one not say: If they also are to be regarded as luminaries, the light they give must be not that which is appreciable by the physical eye, but that rather which addresses itself to the contemplative mind brooding over the mysteries of human life? May the motions and positions of the stars not give a clue to the diversity of human experience? Suppose we try. Let us divide the starry sphere into twelve divisions, or houses, like twelve liths of an orange, six above the horizon, and six below, assigning to each a distinctive character and its own measure of influence on human destiny. Then let us observe the position of these houses at the birth-hour of this or that human being, say the child of a king, or of a prince or a sage, and let us watch throughout the years which follow how far the actual career of those whose nativity was cast corresponds with what the astrological indications led us to expect. If in the life-histories of some notable men remarkable correspondences are discovered, then the hypothesis that the positions of the heavenly bodies, if they do not exert a causal influence upon, do at least help us to predict, the course of human destiny, may be regarded as established. This conception of the movements of the stars as in a pre-established harmony with the changes in man's life has a certain magnificence about it which appeals to the imagination; and we can easily understand how it should commend itself to the Stoics, with their pantheistic theory of solidarity binding together all parts of the universe, and even to an astronomer like Kepler.

The far-famed Delphic Oracle supplies an instance in which the natural medium of revelation was a subterranean influence in the form of an intoxicating vapour, which, when inhaled by the priestess sitting on the tripod over the chasm whence the exhalation proceeded, inspired her with the gift of prophecy. The unusual character of the phenomenon seemed to point it out as available for divining purposes, and the alleged effect, in an age when divination was believed in, would be regarded as amply justifying expectation. The solitude of the spot and its sublime surroundings, hemmed in by mountain precipices, were fitted to create on susceptible minds the impression that here, if anywhere, the gods might be expected to speak to men. In the Homeric hymn to the Pythian Apollo that god is represented as seeking for a spot where he may found an oracle, and on coming to Crissa under Mount Parnassus, as finding there a place manifestly marked out for the purpose by its seclusion and by the grandeur of its environment.12 The wisdom of his selection was proved by the event. The oracle of Delphi became renowned throughout Greece and beyond, and eclipsed all other means of ascertaining the divine will. It was not the only oracle in Greece. There were oracles of gods, demons, and heroes; and in particular one at Dodona, sacred to Zeus, whose prestige lay in its great antiquity. Its divine signs were the sound of the rushing wind among the leaves of an oak, the murmur of a spring at its foot, and a caldron or pan of bronze suspended on its branches with a chain that knocked in the breeze against its side and spoke divine messages to the devout ear. In the old times of orthodox Pagan faith they were wont to speak of the basin that is never silent, and when a new faith had come in its adherents said in triumph: ‘The oak speaks no more,’ ‘the caldron prophesies no more.’ But Delphi outshone Dodona, and still more did it extinguish the light of individual diviners of the type of Calchas and Tiresias. It grew to be the centre of a wealthy religious corporation, and it became an important factor in the political history of Grecian states, through the answers which it gave to those who sought its guidance in affairs of grave import. These answers were rendered more imposing by being delivered at first in, or translated into, hexameters. The poetry, if it came from the lips of the Pythia, must be put to the credit of the inspiring god; for the qualification for being a good Pythian prophetess was to be entirely passive under divine influence, a mere mechanical mouthpiece of Apollo. The time came when poetry gave way to plain prose, and the fame of the oracle began to decline. It fell into disrepute when Greece lost its independence under Macedonia and Rome. From that time it ceased to be a political power, and degenerated into an establishment for carrying on the trade of vulgar soothsaying.

This decline became a subject of anxious reflection to devout adherents of the old religion. In an essay on the cessation of oracles, Plutarch offers tentative solutions. It was a natural subject of discussion for one who had studied philosophy at Delphi, and had an opportunity of observing how the glory of the oracle had departed in the age in which he lived, the first century of our era. In that essay Plutarch makes one of his interlocutors say: ‘Is it wonderful if, with iniquity abounding, not only as Hesiod foretold, reverence and justice have forsaken the earth, but also the Providence of the gods, which provided the oracles, hath everywhere departed?’ Another, in a similar strain, suggests that Providence having given men, as a benevolent parent, many other things, had refused them oracles for their sins. An entirely distinct theory is hinted at when the view is enunciated by a third party in the discussion that not God but demons are the cause of the cessation. Demons, unlike the gods, are subject to change, decay, senility, and religious institutions in which they act as the agents of Deity may share their subjection to transiency. Cicero, discussing the same topic, in his work on Divination, ignores this distinction between gods and demons, and treats the theory as subjecting the gods to the category of decay, and therefore as false and untenable. Age, he contends, cannot affect the divine, meaning to hint that the oracle, had it been really divine, would have been eternal, and that the simple explanation of its decay was that men began to be less credulous.13

This brings us face to face with the question, Is divination a reality, or is it only a great delusion? The knowledge of the future which the diviner promises to put within men's reach by his art is tempting, if there be such a thing; but is there? Reflection suggests doubts of various sorts: as to the possibility, the rationality, the certainty, the utility, and the moral tendency of the foresight thus acquired. On the first of these points Cicero presses believers in divination with a dilemma. Fortuities, he argues, cannot be foreseen, therefore there is no divination; fatalities can be foreseen, because certain; therefore again there is no divination, because divination has to do with the fortuitous.14 The reasoning is addressed to the Stoics, who believed both in fate and in divination, and is intended to convince them of the inconsistency of their position. The Stoics were acute logicians, and would have their own way of getting out of the difficulty. Their idea of the matter seems to have been this: that, from the beginning, the world was so ordered that certain signs, discoverable in different parts of nature, as in the stars of heaven, or in the livers of animals, should precede certain events, so that the law of connection between sign and event being once ascertained, from the observed sign the event could be predicted.15 This view, while recognising the superficial aspect of fortuitousness in the system of signs, regards them as, not less than the events, pre-ordained, and certain. It implies further that both signs and events, while teleologically connected, may have physical causes. The doctrine practically amounts to the assertion that a fixed physical order and a providential order are not mutually exclusive, but are simply different aspects of the same universe. So stated, the position of the Stoics is not easily assailed, and on the whole it may be admitted that divination is not to be got rid of by short-hand metaphysical argumentation. The conception of a system of interpretable signs inwoven into the frame of nature, intended by Divine Providence to serve the purpose of revealing the future, is not on the face of it absurd.

But abstract possibility is one thing, probability, or rationality, is another. In the theory of divination the unusual is supposed to be the appropriate region of the significant. If you want to find the signs whose accurate interpretation yields the knowledge of future events, you must seek them above all among the rarer phenomena of nature. This proposition, while commending itself to men living in a pre-scientific age as natural and reasonable, is nevertheless very open to criticism. It is easy to see, of course, how the unusual should be regarded as the sphere of the divinely significant when the unusual was conceived as that which had no natural cause. Then a portent, such as that of a mule having offspring, naturally passed for a vehicle of special divine revelation. Against this popular way of thinking, Cicero taught that every event has a natural cause, and that, though praeter consuetudinem, it is not praeter naturam. A mule bearing offspring a miracle because it does not happen often!16 If it could not have happened it would not; if it could, it is not a miracle.17 Thus viewed, the unusual can have no special significance as compared with the usual. The only question is whether it can have even as much significance, not to speak of more. That there is a revelation of God and of His will in nature is every way credible. But what sort of revelation is to be expected, and where is it chiefly to be looked for? If the knowledge desired be that of special events in the future, as procured by the diviner's art, then the unusual is necessarily the significant, because there is nothing in the usual to attract attention. That the sun rises every day can mean nothing for any individual man or people, but that the sun undergoes eclipse at a critical juncture may be very ominous in reference to an impending event, such as a battle. If, on the other hand, the knowledge sought be that of general laws, as revealing Divine Reason and Divine Beneficence, then the usual is the significant and the unusual the non-significant, or that in which significance is obscure. Though both alike due to physical causes, the usual and the unusual are nevertheless both capable of being the vehicle of revelation; but if the revelation desired be of the nature last described, then the advantage lies not with that which happens rarely, but with that which happens regularly. I would sooner trust the lark's song on a summer morning as a revelation of the truth that the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord, than believe that the issue of a battle depended on the crowing of a cock, or the fortune of war on the dropping of grain on the ground from the greedy mouths of sacred chickens.18 It is what one can learn from the rule rather than from the exception, from the fixed order of nature rather than from what seem breaches of that order, or random chances subject to no order, that is important. The Psalmist understood this when he wrote: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God. . . in them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun. . . . His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.’19 The sun in his daily course, not in the rare eclipse, is for the Psalmist the declarer of the Divine glory. And, granting for a moment that the two kinds of revelation are possible, a general revelation of the glorious reason, wisdom, justice, and goodness of God, and a special revelation of particular events concerning the future fortunes of individuals and peoples, there can be little question in rightly conditioned minds as to which of the two is the more important. The diviner may possibly have his place, but it is far in the background as compared with that of the prophet. The prophet also has something to say on the future fortunes of men and nations, but the special events he takes an interest in are simply concrete exemplifications of great moral principles. The general ethical revelation of God is for him the thing of supreme value.

The lack of certainty in the diviner's revelation is a grave drawback. Not much is gained by the existence of a system of interpretable signs. All turns on the interpretations. Who is to be the interpreter? Who is to fix the principles of interpretation? Are they to be determined by guessing to begin with, and then by verifying the guesses by subsequent observation? Take dreams, for example. Some appear utterly trivial, some grotesque; few reveal plainly what they are supposed to mean. How shall we know which have any meaning, and how shall we find out the import of those which have, seeing their significance is for the most part enigmatical? Cicero compares the gods, making so-called revelations through dreams, to Carthaginians or Spaniards speaking in the Roman Senate without an interpreter;20 and he lays down the peremptory principle that if the gods want men to know, the signs they give ought to be clear, and if they do not want men to know they ought not to give any signs at all, not even occult ones.21 There is force in his contention. To what purpose fill the world with an elaborate system of premonitory signs which are as hard to interpret as hieroglyphics, and by their obscurity offer a too tempting opportunity to the pretender and the quack?

Supposing the difficulty of interpretation to be got over, the next question that arises is, cui bono? Is it useful to know beforehand what is going to befall us? Is it not rather a merciful arrangement that the future is hidden from our eyes by a thick veil, so that we can live in hope even when tragic experiences lie before us? Does not that very divine care for men which is the major premiss of the argument in support of divination really raise a presumption against it? May we not argue: ‘Yes, God does care for man, therefore He keeps the times and seasons in His own power, so that neither men nor angels know the day or hour.’ ‘Would Pompey, think you,’ asks Cicero, ‘have rejoiced in his three consulships, and his three triumphs, if he had known that he was to be murdered in an Egyptian solitude, after losing his army, and that after his death things were to happen which cannot be spoken of without tears?’22

On the relation of divination to the moral order I shall have an opportunity of speaking in next Lecture; meantime I offer a few observations on its moral tendency. Moral tendency is not to be put in the forefront in criticising a system, but when evil results are as prominent as they certainly are in the history of divination, it is legitimate to refer to them as raising a grave doubt whether the diviner has any claim to be regarded as the instrument of a beneficent Providence. Roman annals report damning facts against the astrologers. They were expelled from Rome in A.D. 139, as a public nuisance and danger to the State. Tacitus describes the Mathematicians as a race of men treacherous to the powerful, deceitful to those whose hopes they fed; a race which would always deserve to be under the ban, and which nevertheless would always receive encouragement.23 A Christian bishop of early date describes the same class of men as making kings disappear by promising to their murderers impunity.24 Shakespeare recognised the justice of the accusation in reference to the whole soothsaying tribe when he made the salutation of the witches on the blasted heath, ‘All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter,’ bear its natural fruit in murder. Such facts help us to understand, if not to sympathise with, the stern injunction in the legislative code of Israel: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’25

Without insisting on the crimes of fortune-tellers of all grades and descriptions, it may be affirmed that the decline of faith in divination was bound to keep pace with the growth of the moral consciousness. In this connection the influence of the Stoics deserves to be considered. For it is true of them, as was remarked at the commencement of this Lecture, that they were destroyers of the faith in divination which they preached. They played two mutually antagonistic parts. They furnished divination with a theoretic basis, and they supplied scepticism with conclusive arguments against its reality and value. The foundations of faith were sapped by sayings uttered by leaders of the school. Among these may be reckoned that which affirmed that the wise alone could divine. This saying, on the lips of the Stoics, had not the depth of spiritual meaning that belongs to the Beatitude: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,’ but it looks in the same direction. For what is the wise man of Stoicism? He is one who sets little store on the goods of fortune, in comparison with the supreme good of virtue. If such a man alone can divine, the trade of the diviner will be in danger of falling out of fashion. He will not care either to be himself a diviner or to be a consulter of diviners. He will regard the future events of outward fortune as not worth ascertaining, and though the world be full of signs by which these events can be predicted he will not take the trouble either to discover or to interpret them. Ultimately this mood must end in scepticism as to the existence of such interpretable signs; for why credit the gods with taking pains to provide means for obtaining a knowledge of the future which wise men do not value? Probably this feeling was the source of the doubt of Panætius.

A disintegrating spirit lurks in certain sayings of Epictetus on the subject of divination. Here is one of them: ‘When you are about to consult the oracle you do not know what is going to happen, but you do know what sort of a thing, if you be a philosopher; for if it be one of the things that do not depend on ourselves, of necessity it is neither good nor evil. Therefore do not bring to the soothsayer either desire or aversion.’26 From consulting in this indifferent mood to not consulting at all is but a short way. The doctrine, ‘All things outward indifferent,’ must end in the doors of the oracle being closed. It does not go so far as Paul's doctrine, ‘All things work for good,’ which is still more hostile in spirit to the practice of divination; but another saying of Epictetus shows that he had reached that point also. It is: ‘If the raven utter an unlucky cry do not be disturbed; you can make all things lucky if you like.’27 One who has reached this position is practically a Christian in temper. There are no unlucky days for him; he knows no fear concerning the future. He takes no thought for the morrow; his motto is that of the Psalmist: ‘My times are in Thy hand.’28 How completely Epictetus had attained to this moral attitude appears from his answer to the question, What is ominous? ‘Do we not call those things ominous which are significant of coming evil? Then cowardice is ominous, meanspiritedness, mourning, grief, impudence.’29

But of all the sayings of the Phrygian sage bearing on the present topic, the most important are those in which he defines a class of things about which we may not consult the diviner. ‘Many of us,’ he says, ‘neglect many duties through unseasonable resort to divination. What can the diviner foresee except death, or danger, or disease, or something of that kind? But if it be my duty to incur danger, or risk my life for a friend, what room is there for divination? Have I not a diviner within which tells me the nature of good and evil, and shows me the signs of both? What need is there, besides, for haruspicy and augury?’30 The use of these in such a case he elsewhere pronounces not only needless, but wrong. ‘When friend or country has to be defended with risk, do not consult the oracle. For if the prophet tell thee that the state of the entrails is inauspicious, that points to death, wounds, or exile. But after he has spoken, reason has something to say, viz., that with friend and country danger must be faced. Wherefore come to the greater, Pythian prophet, who thrust out of the temple a man who was not willing to help a friend in danger of his life.’31 In short, the doctrine of this Stoic teacher is: ‘In matters of duty consult conscience, not the oracle; before doing your duty do not wish to know whether there are to be any disagreeable consequences.’ Cicero had already taught the same high lesson. He praised the man who, when fidelity to a cause was at stake, used the auspices of virtue and did not look to the possible event, and he laid down this golden rule: duty is to be learned from virtue itself, not from auspices.32

Under such teaching as that of Epictetus, the diviner's occupation is gone. The upshot is this: in reference to matters of outward fortune it is not worth while consulting the diviner; in reference to matters of duty it is not lawful to consult him. It is heroic doctrine, and therein lies the diviner's opportunity. Few, even in Christian communities, have made up their minds once for all to do their duty whatever betide. Many, before deciding on their line of action, wish to know what the consequences are going to be. In the old Pagan world men of this time-serving type would have made a pilgrimage to Delphi to get a prophetic forecast of the future. In these Christian ages, when the oracles have long ceased to speak, and the astrologers and augurs are no more, the worldly-wise man must be his own diviner. He must try to guess the future by a sagacious instinct, or carefully study the signs of the times; watch the forces at work, estimate their relative strength, calculate the probable resultant, and, when all this has been done, make up his mind how he is to act. In the rule, what he decides on is just the opposite of what he ought to do, and would do if he took counsel with the wisdom that is associated with moral simplicity. Of course, he is satisfied in his own mind that no other course was open in accordance with the dictates of prudence. He is the wise man in his own esteem, the man who does the right at all hazards being the fool. He is the world's wise man, but not God's. He is the Pagan sage, not the Christian. He lives on the Pagan level, and takes the spirit, if not the art, of the diviner for his guide. That spirit will never die out till men generally value worldly good less and ethical good more. When food and raiment, and all that they represent, have indeed been relegated to the second place, then fortune-telling, and fortune-guessing, and fortune-hunting, and fortune-worshipping will finally disappear.

With divination, say some in our time, Providence and Prayer must go. According to the author of an elaborate history of Divination in Antiquity, ‘he who believes in Providence and Prayer accepts all the principles on which ancient divination rests.’33 Surely not all the principles! Some of them, of course, he does accept, e.g., that there is a god, and that he cares for man. These cover the doctrine of Providence and Prayer, but they are not the specific principles involved in the theory of divination. Besides the general truth of God's care for man, that theory assumes that the divine care, if real, must show itself by revealing to men the secrets of the future. That assumption, we have seen, is very disputable for various reasons; and, moreover, it implies a false estimate of the relative importance of the good and evil of outward lot, as compared with the good and evil of inward state. That assumption therefore must go. But though it goes, the more comprehensive truth of God's care for man may remain, and if it remain the belief in Providence and the practice of Prayer are justified. When the theory of divination is abandoned, what happens to that belief and that practice is not rejection, but purification or transformation. A divine care still exists, but it shows itself in a worthier way; petitions are still offered to a benignant divinity, but for higher benefits. That Providence and Prayer must pass away with Divination is as little true as that, with divination, everything of the nature of prophecy must disappear. How far from being the case this is, we know from the history of prophecy in Israel. There were diviners in Israel as elsewhere. But the time came when the men of moral insight saw that their skill was a pretence and their arts mischievous. What then? Why, the great ethical prophets appeared, laughing to scorn the diviner and all his ways, and showing the people a more excellent way through their noble passion for righteousness, and their grand doctrine that the only path to prosperity was to do God's will. Even so, when the diviner has been turned adrift there remains a doctrine of Providence which stands in the same relation to that which was associated with the practice of divination as the Hebrew prophet bore to the soothsayers of the Semitic world. The decay of divination signifies, not that belief in Providence is growing faint, but rather that it is being perfected. Absolute trust in Providence kills the curiosity out of which springs the diviner's art. The believer in God is so sure of His goodwill that he does not want to know what is going to happen; enough for him that all will certainly go well. The case of Prayer is similar. When divination ceases, prayer for outward good as the summum bonum must certainly come to an end, but not prayer in every form. What happens is that the lower, Pagan type of prayer gives place to the higher, whose chief desire is that God's will may be done, and that His kingdom may come.

A concluding reflection may appropriately be added here. We can now in some measure understand what a formidable barrier the practice of divination presented to moral and religious progress. It found men in possession of crude ideas of God, Providence, and the highest good and chief end of man, and its whole tendency was to keep them from getting any further. It addressed itself to a secular mind, and it worked steadily towards complete enslavement to secularity. Its power was strengthened by its plausibility. What more natural than to place the summum bonum in earthly good fortune; what more tempting than the wish to know beforehand what sort of fortune the future was to bring; what a willing ear those who cherished this wish would lend to men who came to them and said: ‘By the kindness of the gods we are able to communicate to you the knowledge you desiderate’! What weary centuries of fruitless experiments and disappointed hopes it would require to convince men inclined to believe in it that the whole system was an imposture! Perhaps this result could never have been reached, unless a new religion had come capable of lifting men at once into a higher, purer world of religious thought and moral aspiration. Till the new faith came, anything that could help to break the diviner's evil spell was welcome. Even Epicureanism, with its rude denial of divine care for man, was from that point of view a boon. Better no divine care at all than such a grovelling care as the soothsayers ascribed to the gods. The Epicurean denial, with all its onesidedness, was a relative and beneficent truth, sweeping away an imposing falsehood, and preparing human hearts for receiving from another quarter an idea of Divine Providence possessing religious dignity and wholesome moral tendency. Thanks to Christianity, divination, speaking broadly, is a thing of the past. The fact helps us to realise that the world is actually advancing in religious faith and moral practice.

• 1.

  Cicero, De Divinatione, lib. i. cap. iii.

• 2.

  Cicero, De Divinatione, lib. i. cap. xxxviii.

• 3.

  Cicero, De Divinatione, lib. i. cap. xliii.

• 4.

  A. Bouché-Leclerq, Histoire de la Divination dans l' Antiquité, vol. i. p. 3.

• 5.

  Helena, 745, 746.

• 6.

  Antigone, 1036.

• 7.

  Vide Stobaei, Eclog., lib. ii. 238

• 8.

  Vide Nägelsbach, Die nachhomerische Theologie des Griechischen Volksglaubens, p. 164.

• 9.

  κτείνειν δ̓ ὑμα̑ς αἰδου̑μαι τοὺς θεω̑ν ἀγγέλλοντας φήμας θνατοι̑ς. Ion, 179, 180.

• 10.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. xxii.

• 11.

  So Nägelsbach, Nachhomerische Theologie, p. 167.

• 12.

  Ilgen's Hymni Homerici, p. 13.

• 13.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. lvii.

• 14.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii, cap. x.

• 15.

  De Divinatione, lib. i. cap. lii.

• 16.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. xxviii.

• 17.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. xxii.

• 18.

  Observation of the feeding of the sacred chickens was another of the prosaic forms of divination in use among the Romans. The more greedily the chickens ate the more of the food would fall to the ground, and this was regarded as a favourable omen. The omen was technically called tripudium—terripavium, suggesting that the quantity which fell from the mouth of the fowl was enough to make the earthquake. Vide Cicero, De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. xxxiv.

• 19.

  Psalm xix. 1-6.

• 20.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. lxiv.

• 21.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. xxv.

• 22.

  De Divinatione, lib. ii. cap. ix.

• 23.

  Historiæ, i. 22.

• 24.

  Hippolytus, Ref. Hær., lib. iv. 7.

• 25.

  Exodus xxii. 18.

• 26.

  Enchiridion, cap. xxxix.

• 27.

  Enchiridion, cap. xxiv.

• 28.

  Psalm xxxi. 15.

• 29.

  Discourses, lib. iii. cap. xxiv. 8.

• 30.

  Discourses, lib. ii. cap. vii. 1.

• 31.

  Enchiridion, cap. xxxix.

• 32.

  De Divinatione, cap. xxxvii.

• 33.

  A. Bouché-Leclereq, Histoire de la Divination dans l'Antiquité, vol. i. p. 104.