The government was still less theocratical when Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, employed many of the Jews to punish those whom he regarded as rebels. He forbade them all, under pain of death, to circumcise their children; he compelled them to sacrifice swine in their temple, to burn the gates, to destroy the altar; and the whole enclosure was filled with thorns and brambles.
Matthias rose against him at the head of some citizens, but he was not king. His son, Judas Maccabæus, taken for the Messiah, perished after glorious struggles. To these bloody contests succeeded civil wars. The men of Jerusalem destroyed Samaria, which the Romans subsequently rebuilt under the name of Sebasta.
In this chaos of revolutions, Aristobulus, of the race of the Maccabees, and son of a high priest, made himself king, more than five hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem. He signalized his reign like some Turkish sultans, by cutting his brother's throat, and causing his mother to be put to death. His successors followed his example, until the period when the Romans punished all these barbarians. Nothing in all this is theocratical.
If anything affords an idea of theocracy, it must be granted that it is the papacy of Rome; it never announces itself but in the name of God, and its subjects live in peace. For a long time Thibet enjoyed the same advantages under the Grand Lama; but that is a gross error striving to imitate a sublime truth.
The first Incas, by calling themselves descendants in a right line from the sun, established a theocracy; everything was done in the name of the sun. Theocracy ought to be universal; for every man, whether a prince or a boatman, should obey the natural and eternal laws which God has given him.
THEODOSIUS.
Every prince who puts himself at the head of a party, and succeeds, is sure of being praised to all eternity, if the party lasts that time; and his adversaries may be assured that they will be treated by orators, poets, and preachers, as Titans who revolted against the gods. This is what happened to Octavius Augustus, when his good fortune made him defeat Brutus, Cassius, and Antony. It was the lot of Constantine, when Maxentius, the legitimate emperor, elected by the Roman senate and people, fell into the water and was drowned.
Theodosius had the same advantage. Woe to the vanquished! blessed be the victorious!—that is the motto of mankind. Theodosius was a Spanish officer, the son of a Spanish soldier of fortune. As soon as he was emperor he persecuted the anti-consubstantialists. Judge of the applauses, benedictions, and pompous eulogies, on the part of the consubstantialists! Their adversaries scarcely subsist any longer; their complaints and clamors against the tyranny of Theodosius have perished with them, and the predominant party still lavishes on this prince the epithets of pious, just, clement, wise, and great.
One day this pious and clement prince, who loved money to distraction, proposed laying a very heavy tax upon the city of Antioch, then the finest of Asia Minor. The people, in despair, having demanded a slight diminution, and not being able to obtain it, went so far as to break some statues, among which was one of the soldier, the emperor's father. St. John Chrysostom, or golden mouth, the priest and flatterer of Theodosius, failed not to call this action a detestable sacrilege, since Theodosius was the image of God, and his father was almost as sacred as himself. But if this Spaniard resembled God, he should have remembered that the Antiochians also resembled Him, and that men formed after the exemplar of all the gods existed before emperors.