over the ocean; Jove over the land and sky. One divinity wakes the olive and the corn, another has charge of the vine. One guides the day from his chariot with golden wheels. A sister Deity walks in brightness through the nocturnal sky. A fountain in the shade, a brook leaping down the hills, or curling through the plains; a mountain walled with savage rocks; a sequestered vale fringed with romantic trees,—each was the residence of a God. Demons dwelt in dark caves, and shook the woods at night with hideous rout, breaking even the cedars. They sat on the rocks—fair virgins above the water, but hideous shapes below—to decoy sailors to their destruction. The mysterious sounds of Nature, the religious music of the wind playing among the pines at eventide, or stirring the hot palm tree at noonday, was the melody of the God of sounds.[1] A beautiful form of man or woman was a shrine of God.[2] The storms had a deity. Witches rode the rack of night. A God offended roused nations to war, or drove Ulysses over many lands. A pestilence, drought, famine, inundation, an army of locusts was the special work of a God.[3]
- ↑ See the beautiful lines of Wordsworth, Excursion, Boston, 1824, Book IV. p. 159, et seq. See also Creutzer, ubi sup., Vol. I. p. 8—29.
- ↑ See Herodotus, V. 47. The Greeks erected an altar on the grave of Philippos, the most beautiful of the Greeks, and offered sacrifice. See Wachsmuth, Antiquities of Greece, Vol. II. 2, p. 315, on the general adoration of Beauty amongst the Greeks. Hegel calls this worship the Religion of Beauty. Phil. der Religion, Vol. II. p. 96, et seq. National character marks the religious form.
- ↑ A disease was sometimes personified and worshipped, as Fever at Rome. See Ælian, Var. Hist. XII. 11, p. 734, et seq., ed. Gronovius; Valerius Maximus, Lib. II. Ch. V. 6, Vol. I. p. 126, et seq., ed. Hase. Some say a certain ruin at Tivoli is the remnant of a Temple to Tussis, a cough. Cicero speaks of a temple to Fever on the Palatine. Nat. Deorum, III. 15, Opp. ed. Lemaire, XII. p. 333, where see the note. Nero erected a monument to the Manes of a crystal vase that got broken. Temples were erected to Shame and Impudence, Fear, Death, Laughter, and Gluttony, among the Heathen, as shrines to the Saints among Christians. Pausanias, Lib. IV. Ch. XVII., says, the Athenians alone of all the Greeks had a Temple for Modesty and Mercy. See, however, the ingenious remark of Cousin, Journal des Savans, March, 1835, p. 136, et seq., and Creutzer's animadversions thereon, ubi sup. Vol. I. p. 135, 136. Brouwer, Vol. I. p. 357. In India, each natural object is the seat of a God. But in Greece the worship of nature passed into the higher form. See some fanciful remarks of Hermann on the most ancient mythology of the Greeks in his Opuscula, Vol. II. p. 167. It is a noticeable fact that some of the old Polytheistic theogonies spoke of a gradual and progressive development of the Gods; the creator keeps even pace with the creation. The explanation of a fact so singular as the self-contradictory opinion that the Infinite is not always the same may be found
