CHAP. II.
-----fined by the chains of any speculative system. The ' devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth [1]. Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The
thin texture of the pagan mythology was interwoven with various, but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality; it was universally confessed, that they deserved, if not the adoration, at least the reverence of all mankind. The deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed, in peace, their local and respective influence ; nor could the Roman who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber, deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile. The visible powers of nature, the planets, and the elements, were the same throughout the universe. The invisible governors of the moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mould of fiction and allegory. Every virtue, and even vice, acquired its divine representative ; every art and profession its patron, whose attributes, in the most distant ages and countries, were
uniformly derived from the character of their peculiar votaries. A republic of gods of such opposite tempers and interest, required in every system the moderating hand of a supreme magistrate, who, by the progress of knowledge and flattery, was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an eternal parent, and an omnipotent monarch[2]. Such was the mild spirit of
- ↑ There is not any writer who describes in so lively a manner as Herodotus, the true genius of polytheism. The best commentary may be found in Mr. Hume's Natural History of Religion ; and the best contrast in Bossuet's Universal History. Some obscure traces of an intolerant spirit appear in the conduct of the Egyptians; (see Juvenal, sat. xv.) and the christians as well as jews who lived under the Roman empire, formed a very important exception ; so important indeed, that the discussion will require a distinct chapter of this work.
- ↑ The rights, powers, and pretensions of the sovereign of Olympus, are very clearly described in the fifteenth book of the Iliad : in the Greek original, I mean ; for Mr. Pope, without perceiving it, has improved the theology of Homer.
