Theological Essays and Other Papers, vol 1 | Page 9

that constituted the duty of the priest. Beyond this
ritual of public worship, there was nothing at all; nothing to believe,
nothing to understand. A set of legendary tales undoubtedly there was,
connected with the mythologic history of each separate deity. But in
what sense you understood these, or whether you were at all acquainted
with them, was a matter of indifference to the priests; since many of
these legends were variously related, and some had apparently been
propagated in ridicule of the gods, rather than in their honor.
With Christianity a new scene was opened. In this religion the cultus,
or form of worship, was not even the primary business, far less was it
the exclusive business. The worship flowed as a direct consequence
from the new idea exposed of the divine nature, and from the new idea
of man's relations to this nature. Here were suddenly unmasked great
doctrines, truths positive and directly avowed: whereas, in Pagan forms
of religion, any notices which then were, or seemed to be, of
circumstances surrounding the gods, related only to matters of fact or
accident, such as that a particular god was the son or the nephew of
some other god; a truth, if it were a truth, wholly impertinent to any
interest of man.
As there are some important truths, dimly perceived or not at all,
lurking in the idea of God,--an idea too vast to be navigable as yet by
the human understanding, yet here and there to be coasted,--I wish at
this point to direct the reader's attention upon a passage which he may
happen to remember in Sir Isaac Newton: the passage occurs at the end
of the 'Optics;' and the exact expressions I do not remember; but the
sense is what I am going to state: Sir Isaac is speaking of God; and he
takes occasion to say, that God is not good, but goodness; is not holy,
but holiness; is not infinite, but infinity. This, I apprehend, will have
struck many readers as merely a rhetorical _bravura_; sublime, perhaps,
and fitted to exalt the feeling of awe connected with so unapproachable
a mystery, but otherwise not throwing any new light upon the darkness

of the idea as a problem before the intellect. Yet indirectly perhaps it
does, when brought out into its latent sense by placing it in
juxtaposition with paganism. If a philosophic theist, who is also a
Christian, or who (not being a Christian,) has yet by his birth and
breeding become saturated with Christian ideas and feelings,[Footnote:
this case is far from uncommon; and undoubtedly, from having too
much escaped observation, it has been the cause of much error. Poets I
could mention, if it were not invidious to do so, who, whilst composing
in a spirit of burning enmity to the Christian faith, yet rested for the
very sting of their pathos upon ideas that but for Christianity could
never have existed. Translators there have been, English, French,
German, of Mahometan books, who have so colored the whole vein of
thinking with sentiments peculiar to Christianity, as to draw from a
reflecting reader the exclamation, 'If this can be indeed the product of
Islamism, wherefore should Christianity exist?' If thoughts so divine
can, indeed, belong to a false religion, what more could we gain from a
true one?] attempts to realize the idea of supreme Deity, he becomes
aware of a double and contradictory movement in his own mind whilst
striving towards that result. He demands, in the first place, something
in the highest degree generic; and yet again in the opposite direction,
something in the highest degree individual; he demands on the one path,
a vast ideality, and yet on the other, in union with a determinate
personality. He must not surrender himself to the first impulse, else he
is betrayed into a mere _anima mundi_; he must not surrender himself
to the second, else he is betrayed into something merely human. This
difficult antagonism, of what is most and what is least generic, must be
maintained, otherwise the idea, the possible idea, of that august
unveiling which takes place in the Judaico-Christian God, is absolutely
in clouds. Now, this antagonism utterly collapses in paganism. And to a
philosophic apprehension, this peculiarity of the heathen gods is more
shocking and fearful than what at first sight had seemed most so. When
a man pauses for the purpose of attentively reviewing the Pantheon of
Greece and Rome, what strikes him at the first with most depth of
impression and with most horror is, the wickedness of this Pantheon.
And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a
furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you
descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the

Nereids