Theological Essays and Other Papers, vol 1 | Page 8

eyes
smiled darkly upon the throbbings of tortured flesh, as in Moloch's ears
dwelt like music the sound of infants' wailings. Secondly, as to the birth
of a new idea respecting the nature of God:--It may not have occurred
to every reader, but none will perhaps object to it, when once suggested
to his consideration, that--as is the god of any nation, such will be that
nation. God, however falsely conceived of by man. even though
splintered into fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured by the darkest
mythologies, is still the greatest of all objects offered to human
contemplation. Man, when thrown upon his own delusions, may have
raised himself, or may have adopted from others, the very falsest of
ideals, as the true image and reflection of what he calls god. In his
lowest condition of darkness, terror may be the moulding principle for
spiritual conceptions; power, the engrossing attribute which he ascribes
to his deity; and this power may be hideously capricious, or associated
with vindictive cruelty. It may even happen, that his standard of what is
highest in the divinity should be capable of falling greatly below what
an enlightened mind would figure to itself as lowest in man. A more
shocking monument, indeed, there cannot be than this, of the infinity
by which man may descend below his own capacities of grandeur: the
gods, in some systems of religion, have been such and so monstrous by
excesses of wickedness, as to insure, if annually one hour of periodical
eclipse should have left them at the mercy of man, a general rush from
their own worshippers for strangling them as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the
cringing of sycophants, and the credulities of fear, united to conceal
this misotheism; but we may be sure that it was widely diffused
through the sincerities of the human heart. An intense desire for kicking
Jupiter, or for hanging him, if found convenient, must have lurked in

the honorable Koman heart, before the sincerity of human nature could
have extorted upon the Roman stage a public declaration,--that their
supreme gods were capable of enormities which a poor, unpretending
human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many times the
ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races, fell under the
contempt, not only of men superior to the national superstition, but of
men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with all those drawbacks, an
ideal was an ideal. The being set up for adoration as god, was such
upon the whole to the worshipper; since, if there had been any higher
mode of excellence conceivable for him, that higher mode would have
virtually become his deity. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that the
nature of the national divinities indicated the qualities which ranked
highest in the national estimation; and that being contemplated
continually in the spirit of veneration, these qualities must have worked
an extensive conformity to their own standard. The mythology
sanctioned by the ritual of public worship, the features of moral nature
in the gods distributed through that mythology, and sometimes
commemorated by gleams in that ritual, domineered over the popular
heart, even in those cases where the religion had been a derivative
religion, and not originally moulded by impulses breathing from the
native disposition. So that, upon the whole, such as were the gods of a
nation, such was the nation: given the particular idolatry, it became
possible to decipher the character of the idolaters. Where Moloch was
worshipped, the people would naturally be found cruel; where the
Paphian Venus, it could not be expected that they should escape the
taint of a voluptuous effeminacy.
Against this principle, there could have been no room for demur, were
it not through that inveterate prejudice besieging the modern mind,--as
though all religion, however false, implied some scheme of morals
connected with it. However imperfectly discharged, one function even
of the pagan priest (it is supposed) must have been--to guide, to counsel,
to exhort, as a teacher of morals. And, had that been so, the practical
precepts, and the moral commentary coming after even the grossest
forms of worship, or the most revolting mythological legends, might
have operated to neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them into
better meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, has attempted
something of that sort in his 'Wisdom of the Ancients.' But all this is

modern refinement, either in the spirit of playful ingenuity or of
ignorance. I have said sufficiently that there was no doctrinal part in
the religion of the pagans. There was a cultus, or ceremonial worship:
that constituted the sum total of religion, in the idea of a pagan. There
was a necessity, for the sake of guarding its traditional usages, and
upholding and supporting its pomp, that official persons should preside
in this _cultus_: