ABORIGINAL ATHEISM. 



343 



the love and fear of God never occur in the sacred 

 books of the Hindus." The ancient Persians were 

 ignicolists, adoring ethereal fire. Confucius owned that 

 he knew nothing about the gods, and therefore preferred 

 saying as little as possible upon the subject. Men, still 

 without tradition or training, confused the Creator with 

 creation, and ventured not to place the burden of pro- 

 vidence upon a single deity. Slaves to the agencies of 

 material nature, impressed by the splendours of the 

 heavenly bodies, comforted by fire and light, persuaded 

 by their familiarity with the habits of wild beasts that 

 the brute creation and the human claimed a mysterious 

 affinity, humbled by the terrors of elemental war, and 

 benefitted by hero and sage, — 



" Quicquid humus, pelagus, c eel am mirabile gignunt, 

 Id duxere deos." 



The barbarian worshipped these visible objects not as 

 types, myths, divine emanations, or personifications of 

 a deity : he adored them for themselves. The modern 

 theory, the mode in which full-grown man explains 

 away the follies of his childhood, making the interpre- 

 tation precede the fable, fails when tested by experience. 

 The Hindu, and, indeed, the ignorant Christian, still 

 adore the actual image of man and beast; it is un- 

 reasonable to suppose that they kneel before and worship 

 with heart and soul its metaphysics ; and an attempt to 

 allegorise it, or to deprive it of its specific virtues, 

 would be considered, as in ancient Greece and Rome, 

 mere impiety. 



By its essence, then, Fetissism is a rude and sensual 

 superstition, the faith of abject fear, and of infant races 

 that have not risen, and are, perhaps, incapable of rising 

 to theism — the religion of love and the belief of the 



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