Pantheism has, perhaps, never been altogether a stranger to the world. It makes all things God, and God all things. This view seems at first congenial to a poetic and religious mind. If the world be regarded as a collection of powers,—the awful force of the storm, of the thunder, the earthquake; the huge magnificence of the ocean, in its slumber or its wrath; the sublimity of the ever-during hills; the rocks, which resist all but the unseen hand of Time; these might lead to the thought that matter is God. If men looked at the order, fitness, beauty, love, everywhere apparent in Nature, the impression is confirmed. The All of things appears so beautiful to the comprehensive eye, that we almost think it is its own Cause and Creator. The animals find their support and their pleasure; the painted leopard and the snowy swan, each living by its own law; the bird of passage that pursues, from zone to zone, its unmarked path; the summer warbler which sings out its melodious existence in the woodbine; the flowers that come unasked, charming the youthful year; the golden fruit maturing in its wilderness of green; the dew and the rainbow; the frost flake and the mountain snow; the glories that wait upon the morning, or sing the sun to his ambrosial rest; the pomp of the sun at noon, amid the clouds of a June day; the awful majesty of night, when all the stars with a serene step come out, and tread their round, and seem to watch in blest tranquillity about the slumbering world; the moon waning and waxing, walking in beauty through the night:—daily the water is rough with the winds; they come or abide at no man's bidding, and roll the yellow corn, or wake religious music at nightfall in the pines—these
Hist. Religion, vet. Persarum, Ch. IX. and XX. XXII. Bayle's Dictionary, article Zoroaster, Vol. V. p. 636. See also Cudworth, Ch. IV. § 13, p. 289, et. seq., and Mosheim's Notes, Vol. I. p. 320, et seq.; Rhode, Heilige Sage der Zendvolks, B. II. Ch. ix. x. xii.; Brucker, Historia Philosophiæ, Vol. I. p. 176, et seq. Plutarch was a Dualist, though in a modified sense. See his Isis and Osiris, and Psychogonia. Marcion, among the early Christians, was accused of this belief, and indeed the existence of a Devil is still believed by most Christian divines to be second only in importance to the belief of a God; at the very least, a scriptural doctrine, and of great value. See a curious book of Mayer, (Historia Diaboli,) who thinks it a matter of divine revelation. See also the ingenious remarks of Professor Woods, in his translation of Knapp's Theology, New York, 1831, Vol. I. § 62–66, et seq. See the early form of Dualism among the Christians in Beausobre, Histoire de Manichée et du Manichéisme, 2 vols. 4to.
