especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth to tell,
is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed among
the moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to have
many objects of veneration than none, and that, although idol-worship is
a dreadful sin, still it is not so utterly hopeless as actual
ungodliness. That, among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicated
the true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more modern
unworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the difference in
punishments comparing that of their criminalities. Showing also that,
however corrupted afterwards by impure rites and fatuous iniquities,
heathenism was, in its most ancient form, little more than the
hieroglyphic dress of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazen
serpent, by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after the
manner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent with
philosophy and religion; by the way, in which Egyptian priests satisfied
so good and shrewd, though credulous, a mind as that of Herodotus; by
Hesiod's '_Theogony_;' by the practical testimony of the whole educated
world in earliest times to the deep meaning involved in idolatrous
rites; by the mysteries of Eleusis in particular; by the characters of
all most enlightened heathens--as Cicero, Socrates, and
Plato--(half-convinced of the Godhead's unity, and still afraid to
disavow His plurality,) contrasted with those of the school of Pyrrho,
and Lucretius, and the later Epicureans. The possibility of early
allusions to the Trinity, as "Let us make man," _etc._, having led to
the idea of more than one God; and if so, in some sort, its veniality.
All the above might be applied with some force, and, if so, with no
little value, to modern false semblances of religion, and non-religion;
to Roman Catholicism, with its images, its services in an unknown
tongue, its symbols, its adoption of heathen festivals, its actual
placing of many Gods in the throne of One; to Mammonism, as practically
a religion as if the golden calf of Babylon were standard at Cornhill;
to Voluptatism--if I may fabricate a name for pleasure-hunters,
following still, with Corybantic fury, the orgic revels of Osiris or
Astarte: in brief, to all the shades of human heresy, on this side or on
that of the golden mean, the worship of one true God, as revealed to us
in His three mysterious characters.
But, query? Has not all this, and the very title, for any thing I know,
been done already by another, by a wiser? and, if so, by whom?--Speak,
some friend: it is the misfortune of mere thinkers (and this present
amygdaloid mass, this breccia book, exemplifies it well) to stumble
frequently upon fancies too good not to have been long ago appropriated
by others like-minded. A read, or heard, hint may be the unerring clue,
and we vainly imagine some old labyrinth to be our new discovery:
education renders up the master-key, and we come to regard ancient
treasuries as wealth of our own amassing, from which we deem it our
right to filch as recklessly as he from the mint of Croesus, who so
filled his pockets--ay, his mouth--that we read he [Greek: hebebusto].
Who, in this age of literature, can be fully condemned, or heartily
acquitted of plagiarism? An age--and none so little in advance or in
arrear of it as I--of easy writing and discursive reading, of ideas
unpatented, and books that have outlived copy-right. But this has
detained us long enough: for the present, my brain is quit of its
heathenish exculpations: let us pass on; many regiments are yet to be
reviewed; their uniforms [_Hibernice_] are various, but their flag is
one.
A last serious subject--(they grow tedious)--is a fair field for
ingenious explanation and Oriental poetry,