FullReads

But, thirdly, the gods being such, in what relation to them did man stand? It is a fact hidden from the mass of the ancients themselves, but sufficiently attested, that there was an ancient and secret enmity between the whole family of the gods and the human race. This is confessed by Herodotus as a persuasion spread through some of the nations amongst which he travelled: there was a sort of truce, indeed, between the parties; temples, with their religious services, and their votive offerings, recorded this truce. But below all these appearances lay deadly enmity, to be explained only by one who should know the mysterious history of both parties from the eldest times. It is extraordinary, however, that Herodotus should rely, for this account, upon the belief of distant nations, when the same belief was so deeply recorded amongst his own countrymen in the sublime story of Prometheus. Much[Footnote: not all: for part was due to the obstinate concealment from Jupiter, by Prometheus, of the danger which threatened his throne in a coming generation.] of the sufferings endured by Prometheus was on account of man, whom he had befriended; and, by befriending, had defeated the malignity of Jove. According to some, man was even created by Prometheus: but no accounts, until lying Platonic philophers arose, in far later times, represented man as created by Jupiter.

Now let us turn to Christianity; pursuing it through the functions which it exercises in common with Paganism, and also through those which it exercises separately and incommunicably.

I. As to the Idea of God,–how great was the chasm dividing the Hebrew God from all gods of idolatrous birth, and with what starry grandeur this revelation of Supreme deity must have wheeled upwards into the field of human contemplation, when first surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, I need not impress upon any Christian audience. To their knowledge little could be added. Yet to know is not always to feel: and without a correspondent depth of feeling, there is in moral cases no effectual knowledge. Not the understanding is sufficient upon such ground, but that which the Scriptures in their profound philosophy entitle the ‘understanding heart.’ And perhaps few readers will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was inexhaustible; from gleams of essential evil, to a holiness that could not be fathomed; from a power and a knowledge, under limitations so merely and obviously human,[Footnote: It is a natural thought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of human degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in their power to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, quite as much as we that are not Pagans. The thing wanting to the Pagans, he will think, was the right: otherwise as regarded the power.] to the same agencies lying underneath creation, as a root below a plant. Not less awful in power was the transition from the limitations of space and time to ubiquity and eternity, from the familiar to the mysterious, from the incarnate to the spiritual. These enormous transitions were fitted to work changes of answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader can hardly make any mistake as to this. He must concede the changes. What he will be likely to misconceive, unless he has reflected, is–the immensity of these changes. And another mistake, which he is even more likely to make, is this: he will imagine that a new idea, even though the idea of an object so vast as God, cannot become the ground of any revolution more than intellectual–cannot revolutionize the moral and active principles in man, consequently cannot lay the ground of any political movement. We shall see. But next, that is,–