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Against this principle, there could have been no room for demur, were it not through that inveterate prejudice besieging the modern mind,–as though all religion, however false, implied some scheme of morals connected with it. However imperfectly discharged, one function even of the pagan priest (it is supposed) must have been–to guide, to counsel, to exhort, as a teacher of morals. And, had that been so, the practical precepts, and the moral commentary coming after even the grossest forms of worship, or the most revolting mythological legends, might have operated to neutralize their horrors, or even to allegorize them into better meanings. Lord Bacon, as a trial of skill, has attempted something of that sort in his ‘Wisdom of the Ancients.’ But all this is modern refinement, either in the spirit of playful ingenuity or of ignorance. I have said sufficiently that there was no doctrinal part in the religion of the pagans. There was a cultus, or ceremonial worship: that constituted the sum total of religion, in the idea of a pagan. There was a necessity, for the sake of guarding its traditional usages, and upholding and supporting its pomp, that official persons should preside in this cultus: 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 or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons, reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever could have levied worship from his own. It is true they do so no longer as regards our planet. But what has been apparently may be. God made the Greeks and Romans of one blood with himself; he cannot deny that intellectually the Greeks–he cannot deny that morally the Romans–were amongst the foremost of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose smoke ascended through so many ages to the supreme heavens, may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption. There might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is not quite so sure of that. As a commonplace resounding in schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But that may be because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is homogeneously evil. Dark natures there may be
, whose essence is evil, that may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.