Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/90

perors, or the Roman pontiffs, may have placed themselves at the head of the priesthood or church, and may have allowed their flatterers to place their statues among those of the gods, and to append the title of Divus or Saint to their names; hut in all this church trickery these men no more believed themselves gods, than their people believed them to be of divine nature. The human mind, in a state of sanity, never was discovered in so low a condition of the reasoning power as to approach to any such conclusions. As to a rude and ignorant people elevating their deceased leaders, kings, heroes, to a place among their deities, it is the last thing a rude and ignorant people would think of; for in a rude and ignorant state the natural movement of the human mind is to detract from, not to elevate, the merits of others; and the valued endowments of body or mind in such a state—strength, beauty, valour, or even wisdom in the narrow range of their public or private affairs—are more generally diffused than the intellectual attainments valued by men in a civilised state, and are neither so high nor so rare as to be deified, instead of being subjects of envy and detraction, or of emulation. In no state, barbarous or civilised, are men disposed to yield superiority, and allow divine honours and attributes to mortals who, as natural self-love or vanity will whisper to every one, are not much superior,—not divinely superior, to themselves. The natural movement and tendency of the human mind are equally opposed in every stage of development, in every state of society, to any such hero-worship. Divines overlook the weight of this argument for revealed religion drawn from natural religion—that it is not from man upwards, but from the Divinity downwards, that this universal sentiment of an incarnation proceeds; that the existence of a Supreme Being is not a sentiment more innate in the human mind, than that of the in-