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APPENDIX.

CUSTOMS OF WORSHIP AMONG THE ANCIENTS.

So great an apprehension, says Dr. Stillingfleet, had the Heathens of the necessity of appropriate acts of divine worship, that some of them have chosen to die rather than give them to what they did not believe to be God.

When it was proposed to offer incense and prostration to Alexander, Calisthenes vehemently opposed it, as that which "could confound the difference of human and divine worship, which had been preserved inviolable among them."

The Greeks, Plutarch tells us, thought it a mean and base thing for any of them, when sent on an embassy to the kings of Persia, to prostrate themselves, because this was only allowed among them in divine adoration. Isocrates reproaches the Persians for doing it, because they herein showed that they despised the Gods rather than men by prostituting their honors to their princes. Herodotus mentions Sperchius and Bulis, who could not with the greatest violence be brought to give adoration to Xerxes, because it was against the law of their country to pay divine honor to men.

And Valerius Maximus says the Athenians put Timagorus to death for doing it, so strongly did they feel that the manner of worship which they used to their Gods should be preserved inviolate and sacred.

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Wherever then this impiety has been committed, their theology is not to be accused as its cause, but their forgetfulness of its sublimest dogma, the ineffable transcendency of the first God, as taught its most ancient promulgators, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato. regard to their prayers and sacrifices, Sallust, in his treatise on the Gods and the world, speaks thus. "The honors which we pay to the Gods are performed for the sake of our advantage; and since the Providence of the Gods is everywhere extended, a certain habitude and fitness is all that is requisite in order to receive these beneficent

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INTELLIGENT SYMBOLISM.

communications. But all habitude is produced through imitation and similitude. Hence temples imitate the heavens, but altars the earth; statues resemble life; prayers imitate that which is intellectual, but characters, superior ineffable powers; herbs and stones resemble matter; and animals which are sacrificed, the irrational life of our souls. But from all these things nothing happens to the Gods beyond what they already possess, for what accession can be made to a Divine nature? But a conjunction with our souls and the Gods is by these means produced." Of the principle of sacrifices, he gives the following mystical explanation:

"Prayers accompanied with sacrifices become animated words, the words indeed not animating life, but life animating the words. Add too that the felicity of everything is its proper perfection, but the proper perfection of everything consists in conjunction with its cause. And on this account we pray that we may be conjoined with the Gods. Since, therefore, life primarily subsists in the Gods, and there is also a certain human life, but the latter desires to be united to the former, a medium is required, for natures much distant from each other cannot be conjoined without a medium. And the medium must be similar to the connected natures. Life, therefore, must necessarily be the medium of life, and hence men of the present day that are happy, and all the ancients, have sacrificed animals. And this indeed not rashly but in a measure accommodated to every God, with many other ceremonies respecting the cultivation of Divinity."*

* It seems to us that Sallust has very fairly stated the doctrine of mediation, but has made an illogical application of it to sacrifices, since here it is not life but death that is made the mediation. Thus it seems to have been regarded by Pythagoras, who is said to have condemned all sacrifices of blood to the Gods, but to have encouraged those of flowers, fruits, and especially that every one should offer works of his own hands, the results of his industry, intelligence, and skill, whereby he or she entered into co-action with the Gods. Surely our minds and hearts are most truly directed towards the Gods and their benefits through our enjoyments and sympathies, through the medium of those whom we love and those creatures which delight us by that beauty and harmony of being which represent to us the Divine life in them. Nor can I consider a natural expression of love and trust or thankfulness violently or treacherously to quench the enjoyment of any living creature; and though we have no power absolutely to destroy life, yet it would seem more reverent towards the Gods to respect those forms which they have already given to it. If it were ever an act pleasing to the Gods to take life, it would seem to be

TRANSCENDENT MNEMONICS.

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In regard to statues and their worship, the elegant Maximus Tyrius thus observes. "It appears to me that our discourse has no need, in regard to the thoughts composing it, of certain Phoenician or Ionian or Attic or Assyrian or Egyptian characters; but human imbecility devised these marks, in which inserting its dulness, it recovers from them its memory. In like manner a divine nature has no need of statues or altars; but human nature being very imbecile and far distant from Divinity, devised these symbols, in which it inserted the names and the renown of the Gods. Those, therefore, whose memory is robust, and who are able by directly extending their soul to heaven to meet with Divinity, have perhaps no need of statues. This race is, however, rare among men, but few of whom are not in want of this kind of assistance.

"For Divinity, indeed, the father and fabricator of all things, is more ancient than the Sun and the heavens, more excellent than time and eternity, and every flowing nature, and is a legislator without law, ineffable by voice or invisible by the eyes. Not being able, however, to comprehend his essence, we apply for assistance to words and names, to animals, and figures of gold and ivory and silver, to plants and rivers, to the summits of mountains and to streams of water; desiring indeed to understand his nature, but through imbecility calling him by the names of such things as appear to us to be beautiful. And in thus acting we are affected in the same manner as lovers who are delighted with surveying the images of the objects of their love, and with recollecting the lyre, the dart, and the seat of these, the

rather that of creatures either destructive and pernicious to others, or sickly and miserable in themselves; since we should then seem to invoke the Divine powers to more harmonic expressions of their own essence in the transformations to which we should be accessory.

Every form of joy and beauty is in its life a permanent mediator of Divine Influx to its fellow-creatures, and the chief and most acceptable of all sacrifices to the Gods must be to live ourselves a beautiful, harmonious, and joy-diffusing life.

To their eternal energy we owe the homage of our productive industry, to their wisdom that of the harmonious and orderly arrangement of our concerns, and to their goodness we owe the homage of affection towards all the creatures whom they have given us to love: to their superiority our reverence, to their condescension our beneficent charity, and to their purity temperance and the sacrifice of all things which impede the movement of the Spirit by deranging its organism.

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STATUARY.

circus in which they ran, and everything in short which excites the memory of the beloved objects.

"What then remains for me to investigate and determine respecting statues? Only to admit the subsistence of Deity.

"But if the art of Phidias excites the Greeks to the recollection of Divinity; honor to animals, the Egyptians; a river others, and fire, others, I do not condemn the dissonance; let them only know, let them only love, let them only be mindful of the object they adore." And lastly, the Emperor Julian, in a fragment of an oration or epistle on the duties of a priest, has the following remarks on religiously venerating statues. "Statues and altars and the preservation of unextinguished fire, and in short all such particulars have been established by our fathers as symbols of the worship of the Gods; not that we should believe that these symbols are Gods, but that through these we should worship the Gods."

"For since we are connected with body, it is also necessary that our worship of the Gods should be performed in a corporeal manner; and they, indeed, have exhibited to us as the first of statues that which ranks as the second genus of Gods from the first, and which circularly revolves round the whole of the heavens, (meaning those divine bodies, the celestial orbs, which, in consequence of participating a divine life from the incorporeal powers from which they are suspended, may properly be called secondary Gods.) Since, however, a corporeal worship cannot even be paid to these, because they are naturally unindigent, a third kind of statues was devised upon the earth, by the worship of which we render the Gods propitious to us.

"For as those who reverence the images of kings, who are in want of any such reverence, at the same time attract to themselves their benevolence; thus also, those who venerate the statues of the Gods who are not in want of anything, persuade the Gods by this veneration to assist and be favorable to them.

"For alacrity in the performance of things in our power is a document of true sanctity, and it is evident that he who accomplishes the former will in a greater degree possess the latter. But he who despises things in his power, and afterwards pretends to desire impossibilities, evidently does not pursue the latter, and overlooks the former. For though Divinity is not in want of anything, it does not follow that on this account nothing is to be offered to him. For neither is he in want of celebration through the ministry of words. What then? Is it reasonable that he should be deprived of this? By

MEN DESIRE TO FEEL GOD NEAR THEM.

113 no means neither, therefore, is he to be deprived of the honor which is paid him through works, which honor has been legally established, not for three or for three thousand years, but in all preceding ages-among all nations of the earth." To the reproaches of the Gallileans he answers :-" How, then, do not we consider as wood and stones those statues which are fashioned by the hands of men? Or do you fancy that all men are to be drawn by the nose, so as to think that the artificial resemblances of the Gods are the Gods themselves? But of royal images we do not say that they are wood, or stone, or brass; nor that they are the kings themselves, but the images of kings. Whoever, therefore, loves his king, beholds with pleasure the image of his king; and he who is a lover of Divinity, gladly surveys the statues and images of the Gods, at the same time venerating and fearing with a holy dread the Gods who invisibly behold him."

Dio Chrysostome, upon this subject, dramatically calls Phidias to account for making a statue of Jupiter Olympus, for attempting to represent by something that may be seen and painted that which is invisible and inexpressible.

Then he makes Phidias answer: "Mankind doth not love to worship God at a distance, but to come near and feel him, and with assurance to sacrifice to him, and crown him; like children newly weaned from their parents, who put out their hands towards them in their dreams as if they were still present, so do men, out of the sense of God's goodness, and their relation to him, love to have him represented as present with them, and so to converse with him. Thence have come all the representations of God among the barbarous nations, in mountains, and trees, and stones."

Monsieur Bernier, when at the university of the Brahmans, in Benares, on the Ganges, proposed to one of their learned men the question about the adoration of their idols, with which he reproached him as a very unreasonable thing.

He was thus answered:-" We have, indeed, in our temples many different statues, as those of Brahma, Mahaden, Genick, and Ghavani, who are some of the chief and most perfect Deutas (or Deities), and we have also many others of less perfection, to whom we pay great honor, prostrating ourselves before them, and presenting them flowers, oils, rice, saffron, and the like, with much ceremony. But we do not believe these statues to be Brahma or Beehm, but only their images and representations, and we

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