bly involved in fable, administered retribution in another state of being. And thus even the common language of the most polytheistic nations approached to monotheism.

CHAP.

caste.

I.

Wherever, indeed, there has been a great priestly Priestly caste, less occupied with the daily toils of life, and advanced beyond the mass of the people, the primitive nature-worship has been perpetually brought back, as it were, to its original elements; and, without disturbing the popular mythological religion, furnished a creed to the higher and more thinking part of the community, less wild and extravagant.† In Persia the Magian order retained or acquired something like a pure theism, in which the Supreme Deity was represented under the symbol of the primal uncreated fire; and their Nature-worship, under the form of the two conflicting principles, preserved much more of its original simplicity than in most other countries. To the influence of a distinct sacerdotal order may be traced ‡, in India, the singular union

*This is strikingly expressed by a Christian writer:-"Audio vulgus cum ad cœlum manus tendunt, nihil aliud quanı Deum dicunt, et Deus magnus est, et Deus verus est, et si Deus dederit. Vulgi iste naturalis sermo est, an Christiani confitentis oratio?" Min. Fel. Octavius. The same thought may be found in Cyprian, de Van. Idol., and Tertullian, Apolog.

This is nowhere more openly professed than in China. The early Jesuit missionaries assert that the higher class (the literatorum secta) despised the idolatry of the

vulgar. One of the charges against
the Christians was their teaching
the worship of one God, which
they had full liberty to worship
themselves, to the common people:

“Non æque placere, rudem ple-
beculam rerum novarum cupidi-
tate, cœli Dominum venerari." Tri-
gault, Exped. in Sinas, pp. 438
-575.

"The learned brahmins adore one God, without form or quality, eternal, unchangeable, and occupying all space: but they carefully confine these doctrines to their own schools, as dangerous; and teach in public a religion, in which,

CHAP.

I.

Anthropomorphism of the Greeks.

of the sublimest allegory, and a sort of lofty poetical religious philosophy, with the most monstrous and incoherent superstitions; and the appearance of the profound political religion of Egypt in strange juxta-position with the most debasing Fetichism, the worship of reptiles and vegetables.*

From this Nature-worship arose the beautiful anthropomorphism of the Greeks, of which the Homeric poetry, from its extensive and lasting

popularity, may in one sense be considered the parent. The primitive traditions and the local superstitions of the different races were moulded together in these songs, which, disseminated throughout Greece, gave a kind of federal character to the religion of which they were, in some sort, the sacred books. But the genius of the people had already assumed its bias: few, yet still some, vestiges remain in Homer of the earlier theogonic fables.* Conscious, as it were, and prophetic of their future pre-eminence in all that constitutes the physical and mental perfection of our race, this wonderful people conformed their religion to themselves. The cumbrous and multiform idol, in which wisdom, or power, or fertility, were represented by innumerable heads or arms, or breasts, as in the Ephesian Diana, was refined into a being, only distinguished from human nature by its preterhuman development of the noblest physical qualities of man. The imagination here took another and a nobler course; it threw an ideal grandeur and an unearthly loveliness over the human form, and by degrees deities became men, and men deities, or, as the distinction between the godlike (sosíxeλos) and the divine (os) became more indistinct, were united in the intermediate form of heroes and demi-gods. The character of the people here, as elsewhere, operated on the religion; the religion re-acted on the

*Nothing can be more groundless or unsuccessful than the attempt of later writers to frame an allegorical system out of Homer;

VOL. I.

C

the history and design of this change
are admirably traced by Lobeck,
Aglaophamus, i. 158.

CHAP.

I.

CHAP. popular character.

I.

Religion of
Rome.

The religion of Greece was the religion of the Arts, the Games, the Theatre; it was that of a race, living always in public, by whom the corporeal perfection of man had been carried to the highest point. In no other country would the legislator have taken under his protection the physical conformation, in some cases the procreation, in all the development of the bodily powers by gymnastic education; and it required the most consummate skill in the sculptor to preserve the endangered pre-eminence of the gods, in whose images were embodied the perfect models of power and grace and beauty.*

The religion of Rome was political and military t. Springing originally from a kindred stock to that of earlier Greece, the rural Gods of the first cultivators of Italy, it received many of its rites from that remarkable people, the Etruscans; and rapidly adapted itself, or was forced by the legislator into an adaptation to the character of the people.§ Mars or Gradivus was the divine ancestor

* Maximus Tyrius (Dissert. viii.) defends the anthropomorphism of the Greeks, and distinguishes it from the symbolic worship of barbarians, "If the soul of man is the nearest and most like to God, God would not have enclosed in an unworthy tabernacle that which bears the closest resemblance to himself." Hence he argues that God ought to be represented under the noblest form, that of man.

+ Dionysius Halicarn. compares the grave and serious character of the Roman as contrasted with the Greek religion. The Romans re

jected many of the more obscene and monstrous fables of the Greeks. But it is as part of the civil polity that he chiefly admires the Roman religion, lib. ii. c. 7.

The Palilia and other rural rites. The statues of the goddesses Seja and Segesta, of seed and of harvest, stood in the great Circus in the time of Pliny. H. N. xviii. 2.

§ Beaufort's République Romaine, b. i. ch. 5. Compare the recent and valuable work of Walter, Geschichte des Römischen Rechts, p. 177.

I.

of the race." The religious calendar was the early CHAP. history of the people; a large part of the festivals was not so much the celebration of the various deities, as the commemoration of the great events in their annals. The priesthood was united with the highest civil and military offices; and the great occupation of Roman worship seems to have been to secure the stability of her constitution, and still more, to give a religious character to her wars, and infuse a religious confidence of success into her legionaries. The great office of the diviners, whether augurs or aruspices, was to choose the fortunate day of battle; the Fetiales, religious officers, denounced war: the standards and eagles possessed a kind of sanctity; the eagle was in fact a shrine.‡ The altar had its place in the centre of the camp, as the ark of God in that of the Israelites. The Triumph may be considered as the great religious ceremony of the nation; the god Terminus, who never receded, was, as it were, the deified ambition of Rome. At length Rome herself was impersonated and assumed her rank in heaven, as it were the representative of the all-conquering and all-ruling republic.

* Et tamen ante omnes Martem coluere priores,

Hoc dederat studiis bellica turba suis.

After reciting the national deities of other cities, the religious poet of Rome proceeds,

Mars Latio venerandus erat; quia præsidet

armis,

+ Compare the proportion of Roman and of religious legend in the Fasti of Ovid. See, likewise, Constant, I. 21, &c.

† Ὁ γὰρ ἀετὸς ἀνομασμένος (ἐστὶ δὲ νεώς μικρός) καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀετὸς χρυσοῦς ἐνίδρυται, Dion. Cass. xl. c.18. Gibbon, i. 16. Moyle's Works, The month of Mars began the ii. 86. Compare Tac. Ann. i. 39. year. Ibid.

Arma feræ genti remque decusque dabant.
OVID, Fasti, iii. 79.