1823.] 
humane, more innocent, and more benefi- 
cent, than the new one which supplants it. 
Our priests were a more harmless race 
than those to whom they are now to give 
way. Those enjoyed their authority and 
their revenues in peace, bore with every 
one, and attacked no mav’s faith. These 
are ambitious and intolerant, pursue one 
another with active fary for unmeaning 
phrases, decide by majorities what is te 
be spoken of things unspeakable, and treat 
all those who think and talk otherwise as 
foesof God and man. That the priests of 
the gods had come into collision with the 
civii magistrate, or otherwise troubled the 
public repose, had scarcely happened for 
a series of ages before these vehement 
Iconoclasts broke loose. But the new 
priesthood, since its party has become the 
favourite, has never ceased to throw the 
world into convulsion. As yet their pon- 
tifexes work under ground; but in a short 
time they will snatch at the sceptres of 
kings, call themselves vicegerents of their 
divinity, and under this title claim an un. 
precedented authority both in heaven and 
onearth. Our priests, indced, were na- 
turally enough no very anxious promoters, 
neither were they declared enemies, of 
philosopliy ; from which, under the protec- 
tion of the Jaw, they feared nothing: 
much less did they aspire to bring under 
their jurisdiction the thoughts and opinions 
of mankind, and to prevent the free circu- 
lation of them in society. ‘Theirs, on the 
contrary, who as long as they were the 
weaker party managed to have Reason on 
their side, and to place her foremost in 
every contest, now that she would be hos- 
tile to their farther progress, are going to 
dismiss her, and will not rest until they 
have made every thing dark about them, 
witlidrawn from the people all means of 
information, and branded the free use of 
natural judgment as the first of crimes. 
Formerly, when they themselves still lived 
on alms, the sleek face and courtly man- 
ners of our priests was an abomination : 
but now, that they glide along with swol- 
len sails, the moderate income of our tem- 
ples, which they have seized, is much too 
little to gratify the wants of their pride 
and vanity. Already have their ponti- 
fexes at Rome, through the liberality of 
some snperannuated rich matrons, on 
whose enthusiastic sensibility they well 
know how to play, obtained donations 
and legacies, which put it in their power 
to ouido the first personages of the empire 
in splendor and expense. Yet all these 
sonrces, though ever swelling by the in- 
flux of new streams, will not satisfy the 
insatiable. They will invent a thousand 
methods to tax the simplicity of rude and 
deluded meu, and even convert the sins of 
the world into gold mines; and, in order to 
render these more productive, they will 
Wieland, coneluded. 
eu? | 
imagive a monstrous number of new sins, 
of which the ‘Theophrastuses and Epicte- 
tuses had no suspicion. But why do I 
say all this? What boots it us what these 
people do or leave undone, and how well 
orill they may employ their new authority 
over the sick imaginations of men crippled 
in mind and body by slavery and de- 
banchery? Even the seducers are them. 
selves deceived ; even they know not what 
they do. It becomes tis, who seé all this, 
to treat them with gentleness and pity, 
like sick and disordered persons; and, 
without any view to their gratitude or in- 
gratitude in future, to do them all the 
service for which their own ignorance will 
allow opportunity. Unhappy men, whom 
but ‘yourselves are ye injuring, thus by 
choice to forego that beneficent influence 
ander which Athens became the school of 
wisdom and of art, and Rome the Jegisla- 
tress and queen of the earth? by which 
both arrived at a pitch of culture whereto 
even the better descendants of the barba- 
rians, who are about to divide among 
them the lands and the riches of these 
Greeks and Romans, will never again be 
able to.attain? For what must become of 
men, from whom the Muses and the 
Graces, Philosophy, and the embellishing 
arts of life, and all the pleasures of refine- 
ment, are withdrawing with tie gods, 
their inventors and patrons? [see at one 
glance all the evil which will burst in to 
replace the good, all the deformity and 
monstrosity which these destroyers of the 
beautiful will heap together on the ruins 
of the works of genius, wisdom, and art; 
and I feel disgusted at the sight. Away 
with it! for, as sure as [ am Jupiter Olym- 
pius, it shall not for ever remain so; al- 
though centuries must roll by before man- 
Kind will have reached the lowest abyss 
of declension, and centuries again before, 
by our assistance, they shall have worked 
themselves out of the mire.’ The time 
shall come when they will seek us anew, 
again call on our assistance, and acknow- 
ledze that they are nothing without us. 
The time shall come when, with unwearied 
toil, they will lift out of the dust every 
broken or disfigured remnant of the 
works which beneath our influence quitted 
the hands of our favourites; or dig for 
them amid rabbish and ruin; and vainly 
exhaust themselves in affected enthusiasin 
with striving to imitate those miracles of 
trne inspiration, and of the real presence 
of divine power, 
Apollo.—Yes, Jupiter, most assuredly 
the time will come, and I see it before me 
in all the splendor of reality. They shall 
again exalt our statues, gaze on them with 
the shudder of feeling, aud with devout 
admiration make them the models of their 
own idols, which in barbarian hands were 
becume scare-crows; and, O what a 
triumph! 
