224 THE WORLD AT THE ADVENT. 



heathen was reserved for that religion which alone is both perfect and 

 pure. Judaism was pure but not peifect, IJeatheni:?ni is neither perfect 

 nor pure. 



There is nothing winning, therefore, or touching to man's better 

 nature in these heathen gods, with all the beauty which art and literature 

 have thrown around them. Tlie system prevailed widely and was uni- 

 versally diffused, because man's "nature abhors a vacuum." Mankind 

 will never be satisfied with negatives. It was found therefore with its 

 many modifications everywhere. It was cold enough for the bleakest 

 mountain top. It was dark enough for the deepest shades of the pit. 

 It was vague enough for the indifference, and imaginative enough for the 

 fancy, and easy enough fou- the restiveness of a fallen world. In shor\ 

 like some forms of Pseudo-Ciiristianity — it was a liopeless thing to be 

 saved by, but a delicious thing to be lost by. 



It was indeed an advance from the ruder Paganism, when philoso- 

 phers inspired their gods by the in-breathings of their own souls. But 

 the loftiest of heathen men was one, over whose aspect was thrown the 

 shade, which falls on him who nurses the thought, or dreads that death 

 may be perpetual sleep. This painful impress, which the better spirit of 

 antiquity could not escape, is everywhere seen. The noblest statues of 

 the gods never did and never can attract. Lofty they may be, and a 

 grand beauty mingled with terror may show the power of the intellect 

 by which they were designed. But the divinities of ancient art, when 

 they pass the merely animal and sensuous, terrify, whilst they inspire. — 

 The super-human in ancient art carries with it something so cold, so 

 spectral, that no fire of Genius can prevent it from chilling. It is the 

 beauty of the dead, it is the impiessiveness which repulses. The stu- 

 pendous being, the greatest of its aims is one who often frowns, but 

 rarely smiles — who casts with his own hand the thunder-bolt, but makes 

 it the part of an inferior to spring the light arch of the rain-bow. 



It is of one who revealed himself but once — and left but a heap of 

 human ashes to attest the terror of the god and the presumption of the 

 mortal. There was no choice. Such gods could only be preserved 

 from»becoming contemptible by being made terrible. It was a degradation 

 to suppose that God could be represented in marble. It was no less good 

 taste than sound religion to forbid it at Sinai. In the attempts of heathen 

 sculptors to do it, the highest efforts reached but the production of a 

 sublime repulsiveness. The gods were fearful men on stone. The ter- 

 ror of the eye, the awe of the arm, the compacted omnipotence, the 

 high humanity of these marble divinities, may as mere trophies of arts 

 hold us breathless, but never would they lead us with recovered breath, 



