222 THE WORLD AT THE ADVENT. 



We reply that in some sense they could and did. They could inter- 

 weave their own better thoughts, and take in a more refined sense what 

 in the popular mind was surpassingly gross. The gods might 

 become embodiments of virtues or personifications of nature and 

 truth. But the fact cannot be suppressed, that this sublime idealism nev- 

 er would reach the crowd. When the priests brought oxen and gar- 

 lands to sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas, it might be to them conclusive 

 against their divinity, that these Christian teachers were of like passions 

 with themselves ; but it was not so with the crowd. They had never 

 worshipped beings other than of like passions with themselves ; the 

 king of their deities was an adulterer and murderer, his court was 

 composed of debauched and worthless gods, and goddesses of impure 

 passions, — he had a thief for a prime minister, and had barely escaped 

 being eaten by his cannibal father. 



In all the intricacy of the Mythology, the philosophers saw or pre- 

 tended to see, mythical and fanciful embodiments of the truths of the 

 created and the divine nature, but their scheme was too subtle to produce 

 comfort in themselves or conviction in the people. The system to 

 which they were attached might not expire at once, or grow putrid so 

 soon as it became extinct. But to embroider its shroud after death or 

 to galvanize it into some spasmodic s/tow of life — was not the power re- 

 quired to bring back the breath or keep it from corruption. 



Yet there is in the language of the best thinkers on the nature of 

 the gods, an occasional thought which is almost startling. So near the 

 truth and yet to have missed it : like the comet, which in its swift track 

 nears the sun and seems ready to rush into its bosom, but wheels in its 

 wild orb, and is again lost in the trackless realms of darkness. Cer- 

 tain it is, that they are ofttimes too near the truth to suffer us to re- 

 ceive the representations of those who are fond of degrading to the 

 lowest depths all heathen religions without distinction. It may be that 

 such writers think they give us higher ideas of the divine grace to our- 

 selves if they can show that it has been denied to all others. But it is 

 not God's glory to distinguish the Greek from the .Jevv, except for the 

 Greek's good as well as the Jew's, and to assert it, is not to honor 

 but to reproach him. To think the robe we wear increases in value, 

 because we secured the piece and no one else can have a dress of the 

 same kind, is the appropriate feeling of a silly girl, but we need some 

 higher basis than a thought of this kind for our reverence and love of 

 God. 



There is a melanclioly beauty about many of these fragments of an- 

 cient God-makini[. Thcv arc as beautiful as the marbles of the olden 



