THE WORLD AT THE ADVENT. 223 



times and as imperishable. God-making was essentially one of the fine 

 arts of antiquity. The dreamers in Theogony no more expected to pro- 

 duce real gods than the sculptors expected to produce real men and wo- 

 men. It was the triumph of the art in both cases, if they got a person 

 to think for a time that they were. It was the glory of intellectual 

 power, not of theology, that they sought. They appealed to men not 

 for their belief, but their admiration. Anaxagoras conceives Jupiter, as 

 Apelles paints Alexander. If the former is thought to have a fine con- 

 ception he is as fully satisfied as the latter, if it be pronounced that he 

 has made a good likeness. The philosopher's Jupiter, no more expects 

 to get into any body's creed than the painter's picture. The leader of 

 each system endeavored, in the god he framed, to shadow out his own 

 character. His representations of God were representations of what he 

 imagined he would be, if elevated far above all the ills of humanity, made 

 deathless, endowed with the perpetual youth of Endymion without his 

 perpetual sleep, acting in the loftiest sphere in the raidstof the grand scenes 

 of heaven — with the almighty power, the resistless will, the real joys of 

 divine being. No wonder that as man ever confounds his accidents with 

 the intrinsic portions of his being and his evil with his good, heaven 

 "was peopled with gods and demi-gods, worthy to be compeers of the 

 man-embodying Supreme. No wonder that the Supreme Deity, Hu- 

 manity deified, sometimes showed the lust, the arrogance, or the vio- 

 lence of his archetype. It is Bible language to say, God made Man, — ^ 

 but in paganism, Man made God. They gave their God company be- 

 cause they could not f\o without it themselves, and unconsciously made 

 him vile or feeble, because they knew not their own hearts or their own 

 weakness. 



In this way it happened that the best men devised the best God — 

 the God of Socrates, would be infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, Socrates 

 himself with something of weakness and something of wrong. For in 

 all these cases we are not so much to regard the description given by 

 the philosophers, as what we know must have been their conceptions. 

 There are a thousand sources whence we may draw our expres- 

 sions apart from full conception of the ideas of which they are the expres- 

 sion. 



But though the Gods of the various nations were men and women 

 of superhuman powers, they had entirely human appetites. Their con- 

 ceptions, to be popular, were obliged to conciliate the national vanity. — 

 They made Gods like themselves, that they might boast they were 

 like Gods. The sublime conception of God as the Father, in a sense 

 higher than the political one of the Jews, and the physical one of the 



