Our ancestors complained of the reign of wickedness; we complain of it
and our posterity will complain of it. I sometimes think we are all a
set of complainers and grumblers.
Of ancient pagans it is said: "They worshiped and served the creature
more than the Creator." Of their idols Persius, who was a Roman
satirical poet, born A.D. 34, said:
"O, cares of men! O, world all fraught
With vanities! O, minds inclined
Towards earth, all void of heavenly thought!"
Sedulius, an ancient Christian poet, and by nativity a Scotchman, says
of the same:
"Ah! wretched they that worship vanities,
And consecrate dumb idols in their heart--
Who their own Maker, God on high, despise,
And fear the works of their own hands and art!
What fury, what great madness doth beguile
Men's minds that man should ugly shapes adore
Of birds, or bulls, or dragons, or the vile
Half-dog, half-man, on knees for aid implore."
One of their own poets jests them thus:
"Even now I was the stock of an old fig tree,
The workman doubting what I then should be,
A bench or god, at last a god made me."
The Romans, for a time, were without images for any religious use, but
afterwards they received into their city the idols of all the nations
they conquered; and as they became the lords of the whole earth, they
became slaves to the idols of all the world. Seneca says: "The images of
the gods they worship, those they pray unto with bended knees, _those_
they admire and adore, and contemn the artificers who made them."
The character and condition of their gods was worse than their own. The
common opinion touching their god of gods, _Jupiter_, was that he was
entombed in Crete, and his monument was there to be seen. Lactantius
_wittily_ says: "Tell me, I beseech you, how can the same god be alive
in one place and dead in another; have a temple dedicated to him in one
place and a tomb erected in another?" Callimachus, in his hymn on
_Jupiter_, calls the Cretians liars in this very respect. He says:
"The Cretians always lyars are, who raised unto thy name
A sepulchre, that never dyest, but ever art the same."
Lactantius informs us in book 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine
honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto _goddesses_, to _Venus_,
or _Faula_, to _Lapa_, the nurse of _Romulus_, so called among the
shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched
herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her
heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly
celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called _Floralia_.
They claimed that their great goddess, _Juno_, was both the wife and
sister of Jupiter; and Jupiter, and the other gods, they held, were no
better that adulterers, sodomites, murderers and thieves. Such was not
held in private but published to the world. They were described by their
painters in their tables, by their poets in their verses, and acted by
their players upon their stages. (Lactantius, b. 5, ch. 21.)
As respects the manner in which they worshiped their gods, Alexander, in
his Dierum Genialium, b. 6, ch. 26, insists that the most odious thing
in their history was the effusion of human blood in the service of their
gods. This same author says, "This unnatural, barbarous practice spread
itself well nigh over the known world; it was in use among the Trojans,
as it seems from Virgil's lines touching AEneas:
"Their hands behind their backs he bound whom he had destined
A sacrifice unto the ghosts, and on whose flames to shed
Their blood he purposed."--_AEnead._
Some ignorant infidels seem at a great loss to understand why the Lord
should order the groves and altars of the heathen destroyed. (Again and
again their groves were cut down.) The children of Israel were to make
no offerings in the groves. If infidels will only exercise common sense
inside of the history of the worship of Priapus and Berecynthia, they
will cease fretting over the destruction of those beautiful forests.
Those groves were the most corrupt places upon the earth, places of
retirement from the altar into prostitution, carried on as a matter of
worship pleasing to Priapus. Here, on account of becoming modesty, the
half can not be told. The removal of nuisances in our own country is
conducted upon the same principles upon which groves were destroyed by
the Israelites.
Lycurgus dedicated an image to laughter, to be worshiped as a god, and
this is said to be "the only law he ever made pertaining to religion."
While his great object was to make warriors, he ordained some things
noted for the education of youth. He ordained other laws so much in
favor of lust and all carnality of the worst kind, that it might justly
be said he made his entire commonwealth ludicrous. He instituted
wrestlings, dances and other exercises of boys and girls naked, to be
done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of
young and old men. Adultery was also approved and permitted by the laws
of Lycurgus. Plato and Aristotle advocated community of women, of goods
and possessions, to the end that no man should have anything peculiar to
himself, or know his own children. This was ordained by Plato, in order
to establish in the commonwealth such a perfect unity that no man might
be able to say, that is thine, or this is mine.
Aristotle, in the second book of his "_Politiques_," sets forth many
other detestable things. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine
Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took
away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself.
Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase
of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times
exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance
naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth
should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as
they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how
profitable it is for the commonwealth."
The morality of ancient times may be clearly seen in the fact that all
manner of debasing things were brought to the front. How could men be
persuaded that adultery should be punished when they were taught from
infancy that it was a virtue among the gods? _Lucian_ gives his
experience thus, "When I was yet a boy, and heard out of _Homer_ and
_Hesiod_ of the adulteries, fornications, rapes and seditions of the
gods, truly I thought that those things were very excellent, and began
even then to be greatly affected towards them, for I could not imagine
that the gods themselves would ever have committed adultery if they had
not esteemed the same lawful and good." To all this it may be added that
the opinions of the ancient philosophers concerning virtue, vice, the
final happiness, and the state of the spirit after death, were diverse
and contradictory. The Epicurean doctrine was, that sovereign happiness
consisted in pleasure. They granted a God, but denied his Providence; so
virtue was without a spur, and vice without a bridle.
The Stoics also granted a Divine Providence, but they maintained such a
fatal necessity that they blunted the edge of all virtuous efforts and
excused themselves in vicious conduct. Both Stoics and Epicureans
doubted the immortality of the human spirit, and thereby opened the way
to all manner of licentiousness.
I am persuaded that eternity alone will fully reveal the consequences of
a denial of a future life and retribution; it is a physical leprosy
which removes all the most powerful incentives to virtue and loosens up
the soul to all manner of lustful gratifications.
A man once remarked: "I have lived four years an avowed infidel. I have
boasted that I would live a good man and die an infidel. I have formed
the acquaintance of all the leading infidels of my country, and I am now
prepared to candidly confess that I do not believe any man can keep a
good heart without the fear of God. Such is my observation and
experience."