But

many wild and unwarranted conjectures adopted instead, is a circumstance which it is difficult to explain. The real cause I believe to be, that all great truths require a certain progression of the human mind, both morally and intellectually, in order to be adequately valued, felt, or understood. The true idea of God is too much connected with the true philosophy of nature, with the right feelings of the human heart, and with the proper ethical dispositions of the character, to be either liked or fostered where these are absent. these are notoriously deficient wherever paganism prevails; and without unjustly defaming other ages and nations, we may say, that the strange puerilities which they preferred to worship the fantastic baby dreams which they patronised and sang, with the lavish effusions of their admiring genius; and the positive falsehoods which, on divine subjects, they either ignorantly adopted or designedly taught, imply that the human intellect had not then reached that extended correctness of judgment which these require, nor attained that proportion of knowledge, without which this invaluable faculty of our spirit will not on any subject be efficaciously exerted.*

*Plutarch's representations of the ideas of some of the most celebrated men of antiquity upon the Deity, show us his impressions of what these were; Christians may misconceive them, but he, with a more congenial education, must have sufficiently understood them.

"Some of the philosophers, as Diagoras the Milesian, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Euhemeros of Tegea, said that there were no gods at all. "Anaxagoras declared that material things existed stationary from the beginning; but that the mind of God put them in order, and made generations of them all.

"Plato thought that material things were subsisting, but without any arrangement, and were moving confusedly about, and that the Deity, knowing that order was better than disorder, put them into regularity.

Anaximander affirmed the stars to be the eternal gods; Democritus, that Deity was a fiery form, the soul of the world.

"Pythagoras taught, that of the principles of things the Monad was God, and good, which was the nature of one and the understanding itself; but the Duad was indefinite, and a demon and evil, about which is the multitude of matter and the visible world."

All these systems gave coeternity or anterior eternity to matter. "Aristotle supposed that the Supreme God (avwrarw Osov) was a separate form stationed on the sphere of the universe, with an ethereal body, which he called the fifth. This being divided according to the spheres, cohering to them by its nature, but distinct in reason, he thought that each of the spheres was a living being, consisting of body and soul; of which the body is ethereal, always moving circularly: but the soul is immoveable, and, by its energy, the cause of motion.

For it is universally true that nature must be properly known as to its constitution, laws, and substances, before it can be felt to have been essentially and originally an intelligent creation and until this is sufficiently perceived from direct revelation reverentially believed, or from a distinct knowledge of the composition, science, and adaptations which it contains, an intelligent Creator making and adjusting both its matter and its form will not be attached to it, nor can be convincingly inferred from it.

He is always what he is; but we cannot discern him, till our minds have been duly trained to trace him in his works; just as no one can know astronomy or geography without a similar process.

It is as impossible for a Bramin or Buddist, with their vernacular books of their sciences, to be a rational geographer, as with their Vedas, Puranas, and Ramayunas and accredited idolatry, to have a rational idea of God. A palace cannot be built of mud, nor can the Toorkmun or Caffre architects of their cabins construct a cathedral. Both the mind and the material must be improved before the efficiency can occur; and for this result to take place, sufficient time and the suited progress must intermediately precede.*

"The Stoics thought the Deity to be more common in every thing; a workman fire (TUρ TEXνIKOV) proceeding in a way to the generation of the world, comprehending all things with spermatic reasons, by which all things are made according to fated destiny; a spirit pervading the whole universe, but changing its denominations as it passes through all nature. So that God is the world, the stars, and the earth, and the mind supreme above all in the sky.

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Epicurus declared, that all the gods have human forms (avdpwToεides); but all these can be seen by the reason only, from the subt ilty of the nature of their images. They were also incorruptible, atomical, empty, unbounded and alike."-Plut. Plac. Phil. I. i. c. 7.

* I am quite satisfied, and I write with the largest recollection of all that I have read upon the subject which I can comprehend, that no individual in any country, from the time of Thales to our Saviour, except in the Jewish nation, either believed, or would have admitted, both the first article in our decalogue and the first sentence in our creed, with which the poorest person who attends his Sunday devotion is now familiar:

"I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other God but me." "I believe in God; the Father Almighty; the Maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible."

The creation of matter, and the non-existence of any other gods of any sex, than the One Almighty whom we worship, were nowhere parts of the ancient mind out of Judea.

It is the perceived and understood skill of any human mechanism which occasions us to estimate justly the contriving talents of its maker.

As long as a savage believes that a watch grows of itself, he will never suppose that there has been a watchmaker nor would those who thought a ship to be a living animal, imagine that any naval architect constructed it. So, as long as the classical nations would dream of marriages between the different parts of nature, and literally thought and believed all things to be parental productions; and would consider night, and the sky, the ocean, rivers, fire, and the other elements, to be personal beings forming connubial unions with each other, and having men and gods as their children, or at least constantly talking of them as such, it was impossible, that with such opinions they could think of a designing and forming Creator. It was inore suitable to these ideas that they should have fancied that men crawled out of the earth like worms, or were self-hatched from floating eggs; and when they added to these systems, or rather superseded them, by their Olympian divinities, they only enlarged their own distance from the truth.

Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, the stoic school, and even Cicero, believed in the existence of secondary and inferior divinities, in addition to the Supreme whom they spoke of. All paid worship to some of them, and all taught and practised conformity to the popular superstitions of their country. Nor do I think that any but the Persians were hostile to the representation of their deities by material images of some form or other. Most writers who mention these, applaud and justify the practice. The second commandment was therefore as much beyond them as the first.

Plato disliked Homer's pictures of the intrigues and vices of his gods, but expressly admits the existence of such beings, though with a different costume. Plotinus, Porphyry, and Julian, took similar distinctions, and upheld paganisin stoutly with their own modifications.

Nothing but Christianity would have overthrown it, nor will now do so in any country where it is prevailing.

* Captain Beechy mentions, that the natives of Bear Island, in the Pacific, "supposed the first vessel which they saw to be the spirit of one of their relations lately deceased."-Voyage, vol. i. p. 244.

We must not mistake the disapproval of some of the tales attached to these gods, as indicating a disbelief in the Polytheism. Pindar complains of fables being repeated about them (Olym. i. v. 43), but he was one of their zealous votaries, and revered them as such.

Aristotle, who seems to have preferred the notion that mankind have had no beginning, in one of the works ascribed to him, remarks,-" If men and animals have sprung from the earth, that must have been in one of two ways: either they crawled out as worms, or came out of eggs."-De Gen. An. 1. iii. cap. ult.

t was, indeed, an argument of some good sense on this ect, that they did not suppose the world to be the creation heir favourite gods. This was as certain, as it is, that it been framed by the real Deity. They did unconsciously due justice to him, in not ascribing it to these idols and shipped names, who had no actual existence but in their ular ceremonies, in their state religions, in their groque or beautiful statues, in their individual chitchat, and heir ever-pleasing poetry.*

t is also at first a matter of some wonder to us, that when communication of so grand a truth as the creation of ure had been made to man, it should not have beer. afterd the perpetual companion of the human intellect. It ht have been so if man had been but one vast being, : had never died, but had continued in existence from his tion to this moment: but every man's individual ideas knowledge die with him out of this world, and new gs arise, who have to acquire every thing afresh. Every human mind is born as naturally ignorant of God it is naturally ignorant of every thing else. It is withknowledge of him as it is without any knowledge of all terial nature, or even of itself. It has to attain whatever s to possess. It has no sensations until other things se these to accrue to it. Whatever his predecessors may e heard or discovered, each individual has to acquire for self all the opinions and belief which he may afterd possess, just as if he had been the first human being t had come on the earth. Our personal mind remains hout any of the ideas which are familiar to others, until

We see the impression of the human mind as it rose to greater imements in its knowledge and thought, in the sarcastic observations liny, on the kind of beings which the world-the intellectual Greworld, and his own Roman countrymen, had set up as gods. "The es and vices, men and animals, things the most indecent, of all es, colours, and ages, marriages, adulteries, quarrels, and hatreds; ng these, some winged, some lame, some coming out of eggs, and deities of robberies and crimes :" he truly characterizes such things puerilium deliramentorum."-Nat. Hist. 1. ii. c. 5.

Without suitable instruction, most minds would feel or answer like intutored Esquimaux. Mr. West says, that when among them, e sun was then shining in his glory, and the scenery, in the full tide

it thus learns them from what can impart them. Each of us has, therefore, had to obtain for himself the knowledge that there is such a wondrous being as the Almighty God, and that all things are his creation. This will not of itself fly into the mind like a bird to its tree. We may have sensibilities that are ready to lead us to him, but these are vague emotions, unintelligible to the mind that feels them, until definite information gives them meaning and application. The numerous nations who have not such knowledge, but who have become the prey of base superstitions instead, or who are living vacantly, without any hope or perception on this subject, experimentally prove this fact.*

Whatever we have to know we have to learn, whether it be religion, chymistry, or the mathematics. Every babe in its cradle must be, at that period, without the knowledge of the gracious Power who has caused and superintends it, and so must remain, until some kind friend or parent leads it by degrees to that idea and belief, which its intellectual sensibilities are formed to receive and cherish as soon as they are fitly taught. If it be left destitute of the instruction, it will grow up without it; in this respect it must then be like the animals in the field, or by its fireside, as ignorant of the Divine Author as of its future destiny. From the want of this tuition, the greatest blessing which one being can confer upon another, how many, even in our days, have minds on this point no farther advanced than the most stupid savage of Australia, or the fetish-governed negro;

*There are several of these still in the world. Thus Mr. West found among the North American Indians whom he visited, that though they admitted and addressed the Great Spirit, yet "their general idea is, that they are more immediately under the influence of a powerful Evil Spirit. Their trials, sufferings, afflictions, and death, make them think so; and therefore their prayers are directed to him, when any severs calamity befalls them. To avert his displeasure, they often use super stitious practices with the most childish credulity. They will drum anc dance a whole night, in the hope of bringing relief to the sick and dying! -West's first Journal, p. 135.

Pythagoras connected the earth with his demon principle, as mentioned before in Note on p. 56.

It was for this reason that the Jewish legislator so earnestly incul cated, "Hear! O Israel! The Lord thy God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul These words shall be in thy heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house; and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”—Deut. c. vi. v. 5–7 ; again, c. xi. v. 19