gods and goddesses were as far off from an absolute divinity, as ever were the guardian angels and tutelary saints of Christianity; was himself believed to be subject to the rigid empire of the fates, or what the philosophers called eternal necessity. But the word fate, by its derivation from the natural indication of command-FIAT ! Be it so ; may satisfy us, that nothing more was meant, than that the supreme deity was bound by his own engagements, that his word was irrevocable, and that all his actions were determined and guided by the everlasting law of righteousness, and conformed to the counsels and sanctions of his own unerring mind. So that He, and He alone, could say with truth,

66

Necessity and Chance

Approach me not, and what I will-is FATE."

"One thing, indeed," says our authority, (Mosheim), "appears at first sight very remarkable-that the variety of religions and gods in the heathen world, neither produced wars nor dissentions among the different nations."* A diligent and candid investigation of historical data will demonstrate, that from this general rule, there is no valid and satisfactory instance of exception. The Greeks may have carried on a war to recover lands that had been distrained from the possession of their priests; and the Egyptians may have revenged the slaughter of their crocodiles; but these wars never proposed as their object, the insolent intolerance of forcing their modes of faith or worship on other nations. They were not offended at their neighbours for serving other divinities, but they could not bear that theirs, should be put to death. And if, perhaps, where we read the word divinities, we should understand it to mean nothing more than favourites; and instead of saying that people worshipped such and such things, that they were excessively or foolishly attached to them; considering that such language owes its original modification to Christian antipathies, it might be brought back to a nearer affinity to probability, as well as to charity. An Egyptian might be as fond of onions, as a Welshman of leeks, a Scot of thistles, or an Irishman of shamrock, without exactly taking their garbage for omnipotence.†

* Their religion had not made fools of them.

Who that wished to be a thriving wooer, ever hesitated to drop on his knee and adore his mistress? "With my body I thee worship."-Matrimonial Service.

"Each nation suffered its neighbours to follow their own method of worship, to adore their own gods, to enjoy their own rites and ceremonies, and discovered no displeasure at their diversity of sentiments in religious matters. They all looked upon the world as one great empire, divided into various provinces, over every one of which, a certain order of divinities presided, and that, therefore, none could behold with contempt the gods of other nations, or force strangers to pay homage to theirs. The Romans exercised this toleration in the amplest manner. As the sources from which all men's ideas are derived, are the same, namely, from their senses, there being no other inlet to the mind but thereby, there is nothing wonderful in the general prevalence of a sameness of the ideas of human beings in all regions and all ages of the world. The affections of fear, grief, pain, hope, pleasure, gratitude, &c., are as common to man as his nature as a man, and could not fail to produce a corresponding similarity in the objects of his superstitious veneration. To have nothing in common with the already established notions of mankind, to bear no features of resemblance to their hallucinations and follies, to be nothing like them, to be to nothing so unlike, should be the essential predications and necessary credentials of the "wisdom which is from above."

It has, however, been alleged by learned men, with convincing arguments of probability, "that the principal deities of all the Gentile nations resembled each other extremely, in their essential characters; and if so, their receiving the same names could not introduce much confusion into mythology, since they were probably derived from one common source. If the Thor of the ancient Celts, was the same in dignity, character, and attributes with the Jupiter of the Greeks and Romans, where was the impropriety of giving him the same name? Dies Jovis is still the Latin form for our Thor's day. When the Greeks found in other countries deities that resembled their own, they persuaded the worshippers of those foreign gods that their deities were the same that were honoured in Greece, and were, indeed, themselves convinced that this was the case. In consequence of this, the Greeks gave the names of their gods to those of other nations, and the Romans in this followed their example. Hence we find the names of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, &c., frequently mentioned in the more recent

monuments and inscriptions which have been found among the Gauls and Germans, though the ancient inhabitants of those countries had worshipped no gods under such denominations."-Note in Mosheim.

To have been goddess-born, heaven-descended; to have "lived and died as none could live and die," to have been believed to have done and suffered great things for the service of mankind, but above all, to have propitiated the wrath of the Superior Deity, and to have conquered the invisible authors of mischief, in their behalf, was such an overwhelming draft on the tender feelings, the excitement of which is one of the strongest sources of pleasure in our nature, that the best hearts and the weakest heads never gave place to the coolness and apathy of scepticism. Not a doubt was entertained that a similar series of adventures was proof of one and the same hero, and that the Grecian Apollo, the Phoenician Adonis, the Esculapius of Athens, the Osiris of Egypt, the Christ of India, were but various names of the self-same deity; so that nothing was so easy at any time, as the business of conversion. Not incredulity, but credulity, is the characteristic propensity of mankind.

A disposition to adopt the religious ceremonies of other nations, to multiply the objects of faith, to listen with eagerness to any thing that was offered to them under a profession of novelty, to believe every pretence to divine revelation, and to embrace every creed, presents itself in the history of almost every society of men, and is found as inalienable a characteristic of uncivilized, or but partially civilized man, as cunning is of the fox, and courage of the lion. Unbelief is no sin that ignorance was ever capable of being guilty of; to suspect it of the Gentile nations previous to the Christian era, is to outrage all inferences of our own experience, and to suppose the human race in former times to have been a different species of animals from any of which the wonder-loving and credulous vulgar of our own days could be the descendants.

Of all miracles that could possibly be imagined, the miracle of a miracle not being believed, would be the most miraculous, the most incongruous in its character, and the nearest to the involving a contradiction in its terms. If proof of a truth so obvious were not superfluous, the Christian might be commended to the consideration of authorities, to whose decision he is trained and disposed to submit.

His Paul of Tarsus finds, in the city of Athens, an altar erected to the Unknown Gods;* and taking what Le Clerc considers a justifiable liberty with the inscription, compliments the citizens on such a proof of their predisposition to receive the God whom he propounded to them, or any other, as well without evidence as with it, and to be converted without putting him to the trouble of a miracle. Acts xvii. 22.

The inhabitants of Lystra, upon only hearing of the most equivocal and suspicious case of wonderment that could well be imagined, even that a lame beggar, who might have been hired for the purpose, or probably had never been lame at all, had been cured, or imagined himself cured, by two entire strangers, itinerant Therapeutæ, or tramping quack-doctors, without. either inquiry or doubt, set up the cry, "That Jupiter and Mercury were come down from heaven in the shape of these quack-doctors;" and with all the doctors themselves could do to check the intensity of their devotion, "scarce restrained they the people that they had not done sacrifice."-Acts xiv. 18.

* "Quamvis plurali numero legeretur inscriptio ayvorous 98015 recte de Deo Ignoto, locutus est Paulus. Quia plurali numero continetur singularis."-Cleric. H. G. A. 52. p. 374. There is sufficient evidence, however, that Paul read the inscription correctly; so that the commentator's ready quibble is not called for. The various translations given of this text, make a good specimen of the difficulty of coming at the real sense of any ancient legends.

THE GREEK.

Σταθεις δε ο Παυλος εν μεσω το αρει8παγε εφη ανδρες Αθηναιοι κατα παντα ως δεισιδαιμονεστερες υμας θεωρω.

THE LATIN.

Stans autem Paulus in medio Areopagi, ait, Viri Athenensis, per omnia quasi superstitiones vos aspicio.

1. DR. LARDNER'S TRANSLATION.

"Paul, therefore, standing up in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are in all things very religious.”

2. UNITARIAN VERSION.

"Then Paul stood in the midst of the court of Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are exceedingly addicted to the worship of demons.”

3. ARCHBISHOP NEWCOMB'S VERSION.

"Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are somewhat too religious."

4. COMMON VERSION.

"Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.”

These various translators, however, did not mean exactly to discover, that religion and superstition were convertible terms.-Six, is one thing, and half a dozen another.

CHAPTER IV.

THE STATE OF THE JEWS.

THE grand exception to the harmonious universalism of religions, and to that entire prevalence, as far as religion was concerned, of "peace on earth and good will among men," which arose from the practical conviction of a sentiment which had passed into a common proverb, "DEORUM INJURIE, DIIS CURE," that "The wrongs of the gods were the concerns of the gods," occurred among a melancholy and misanthropic horde of exclusively superstitious barbarians, who, from their own and the best account that we have of them, were colonized from their captivity, by a Babylonian prince, on the sterile soil of Judea, about twenty-three hundred years ago; and, by the exclusive, unsocial, and uncivilized character of their superstition, were exposed to frequent wars and final dispersion. The exclusive character of their superstition, and the constant intermarriage with their own caste or sect, have, to this day, preserved to them, in all countries, a distinct character. These barbarians, who resented the consciousness of their inferiority in the scale of rational being, by an invincible hatred of the whole human race, being without wit or invention to devise to themselves any original system of theology, adopted from time to time the various conceits of the various nations, by whom their rambling and predatory tribes had been held in subjugation. They plagiarized the religious legends of the nations, among whom their characteristic idleness and inferiority of understanding had caused them to be vagabonds; and pretended that the furtive patchwork was a system of theology intended by heaven for their exclusive benefit. There is, however, nothing extraordinary in this; the miserable and the wretched always seek to console themselves for the absence of real advantages, by an imaginary counterbalance of spiritual privilege. An' let them be the caterers, they shall always be the favourites of Omnipotence, and their afflictions in this world, shall be to be overpaid with a "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory," in another. In some instances it will be found, that the means of detecting the original idea has been washed down the