nothing to lay hold of,—still it is impossible to keep them quiet, even in our most solemn devotions, and perhaps it has been found absolutely impossible for the most spiritual Christian altogether to separate the idea of corporiety from God. How much more impossible then must it have been for the uninstructed heathen! With the best intentions therefore, there must have been diversities, and great imperfections in heathen opinions and heathen worship. Such we find to have been the fact. Certain of the existence of a God, yet uncertain of the mode of his existence, it was natural that the human mind should run into a thousand vagaries and a thousand errors. It was natural that mankind should fancy that they had found God in those parts of the material universe where his attributes are most displayed. Hence the most ancient species of idolatry is said to have been that, which deified the heavenly bodies, the sun, and moon, and the host of heaven. The sun is perhaps the brightest emblem of God, except the human soul. To us he is in fact the mightiest instrument, as it were the right hand, of the benignity of the Most High. He riseth, and the shadows of night flee away. Joy and beauty go forth to meet him at his coming. At his call universal life riseth as it were from a universal grave. He draweth aside the curtains of darkness, and saith unto man, "Come forth." He shineth, and the face of nature is glad.

He hideth his face and all things mourn. He withdraweth from the western sky, and darkness resumes her ancient dominion, and all things seem to wait his return. The soul itself, as it were, deprived of its support, gradually loses its energies, and sinks into a profound repose. What wonder then, that in the native ignorance of mankind of the true nature of the Divinity, the wise should have worshipped the sun as the fittest emblem of God, and the ignorant as God himself. Such was probably the idolatry of the nations from among whom Abraham was called to the worship of the true God. Such was probably the worship of the Chaldeans and Egyptians.

There is a very beautiful Eastern fable of Abraham, which though destitute of all historical probability, I cannot forbear to relate. It is said that "As Abraham was walking by night from the grotto where he was born to the city of Babylon, he gazed on the stars of heaven, and among them the planet Venus. Behold, said he, the God and Lord of the universe; but the star set and disappeared, and Abraham felt that the Lord of the universe could not be thus liable to change. Shortly after he saw the moon at the full; Lo! he cried, the Divine Creator, the manifest Deity! but the moon sunk below the horizon, and Abraham made the same reflection as at the setting of the evening star. All the rest of the night he passed in profound meditation; at sunrise he stood before

the gates of Babylon, and saw the whole people prostrate in adoration. Wondrous orb, he exclaimed, thou surely art the Creator and Ruler of all nature; but thou too hastest like the rest, to thy setting; neither then art thou my Creator, my Lord, or my God." How much more sublime as well as rational, the theology which he commenced, and the sentiments which were afterwards expressed by one of his greatest descendants, which make these glorious orbs only the manifestations of something far greater than they!

"The heavens declare the glory of God,

And the firmament showeth his handy work."

Another source of corruption to the Pagan religions was the Priests. It seems the natural dictate of the religious nature in man to commit the management of religious concerns, and the performance of religious rites, to an order of men set apart for that purpose. They thus become better acquainted with them than others, and a sacredness by the power of association attaches to them, which renders their ministrations more satisfactory, and of course more profitable to those in whose behalf they perform sacred offices. A priesthood then, seems to be the law of nature, as far as any institution can be so considered. A priesthood, even under a divine dispensation, with written and express institutions, when nothing com

paratively is left to their discretion, is a dangerous power. How much more so in a religion of human device, where every thing is left to the contrivance of man. Every heathen temple had its priests, who were immediately interested in securing for it the superstitious veneration of the worshippers. What pious frauds were resorted to we may imagine, when we learn that at the church which covers the sepulchre of our Saviour, a fraudulent miracle is performed every year, by which the multitude are made to believe that fire comes down from heaven to light the tapers of the faithful. Thus it was that the religious sentiment, itself honest and ardent, which at vast expense built lofty temples to express and cultivate its best aspirations, was at last cheated in its ignorance and blindness, by the very agents and ministers which it employed to preside over its sacred things.

Another source of corruption to religion was its connection with the government. The religious sentiment, being deeper and more powerful than any other, was soon seized upon and used by the government for its own purposes. It soon formed an alliance with the priesthood, and then all honesty in religious ministrations was at an end. Those in power always found means to make the oracle speak according to their wishes, and the victim at the altars was always found to have just such marks on his entrails as coincided with the purposes of the general

or the magistrate who consulted the will of the gods. More than all, no heathen religion made any provision for the religious or moral instruction of the people. The government and the priests found it more profitable for their purposes to use the religious sentiments of the multitude, darkened into superstition, than to purify and cultivate them, and then use them to ennoble and exalt their species. The philosophers, the only public teachers, considered themselves as having no mission to the multitude, and so they were left a prey to ignorance, superstition and oppression. Such then was the religious condition of the heathen world at the coming of Christ. It is unnecessary to say, that for all moral and spiritual purposes, the Pagan religions were utterly inefficient, and the world was deep sunken in vice as well as ignorance.

A traveller beginning at Egypt, and making a circuit of the Roman empire, would have found that country the lowest in the scale. There he would have seen the millions that inhabited the valley of the Nile paying Divine honors to a living ox, the stupid multitude believing, incredible as it may seem to us, that the Lord of the universe had become incarnate in the body of that dumb and unreasoning brute. If this ox should happen to die, he would see the whole nation in mourning till another was found having the same number and kind of spots on him with the dead animal, and then the mourning would give place to