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I.

The miracles recorded in the Old Testament, parti- CHAP. cularly in the earlier books, are amplifications, as it were, or new directions of the powers of nature; as if the object were to show that the deities of other nations were but subordinate and obedient instruments in the hand of the great self-existent Being, the Jehovah of Jewish worship.

Yet, when it is said that the physical rather than the moral character of the Deity predominated, it must not be supposed that the latter was altogether excluded. It is impossible entirely to dissociate the notion of moral government from that belief, or that propensity to believe, in the existence of a God, implanted in the human mind; and religion was too useful an ally, not to be called in to confirm the consciously imperfect authority of human law. But it may be laid down as a principle, that the nearer the nation approaches to barbarism, the childhood of the human race, the more earthly are the conceptions of the Deity; the moral aspect of the divine nature seems gradually to develope itself with the development of the human mind. It is at first, as in Egypt and India, the prerogative of the higher class; the vulgar are left to their stocks and their stones, their animals and their reptiles. In the republican states of Greece, the intellectual aristocracy of the philosophers, guarded by no such legally established distinction, rarely dared openly to assert their superiority; but concealed their more extended views behind a prudential veil, as a secret or esoteric doctrine, and by studious conformity to the national rites and ceremonies.

CHAP.

I.

Gradually, however, as the period approaches, in which the religion of civilisation is to be introduced into the great drama of human life, as we Religion in descend nearer towards the point of separation the Heathen between the ancient and modern world, the human

Prepara

tion for new

World.

Among the
Jews.

mind appears expanding. Polytheism is evidently relaxing its hold upon all classes: the monarch maintains his throne, not from the deep-rooted, or rational, or conscientious loyalty of his subjects, but from the want of a competitor; because mankind were habituated to a government which the statesman thought it might be dangerous, and the philosopher, enjoying perfect toleration, and rather proud of his distinctive superiority, than anxious to propagate his opinions throughout the world, did not think it worth while, at the hazard of popular odium, to disturb.

Judaism gave manifest indications of a preparation for a more essentially spiritual, more purely moral faith. The symbolic presence of the Deity (according to their own tradition *) ceased with the temple of Solomon; and the heathen world beheld with astonishment a whole race whose deity was represented under no visible form or likeness. The conqueror Pompey, who enters the violated temple, is filled with wonder at finding the sanctuary without image or emblem of the presiding deity † ; + the poet describes them as worshipping nothing but the clouds and the divinity that fills the

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Heaven; the philosophic historian, whose profounder mind seems struggling with hostile prejudices, defines with his own inimitable compression of language, the doctrine, to the sublimity of which he has closed his eyes. "The worship of the Jews is purely mental; they acknowledge but one God and that God supreme and eternal, neither changeable, nor perishable."+ The doctrine of another life (which derived no sanction from the Law, and was naturally obscured by the more immediate and intelligible prospect of temporal rewards and punishments,) dawns in the prophetic writings; and from the apocryphal books and from Josephus, as well as from the writings of the New Testament, clearly appears to have become incorporated with the general sentiment. Retribution in another life has already taken the place of the immediate or speedy avenging or rewarding providence of the Deity in the land of Canaan. +

CHAP.

I.

of Judaism.

Judaism however only required to expand with Expansion the expansion of the human mind; its sacred records had preserved in its original simplicity the notion of the Divine Power; the pregnant definitions of the one great self-existing Being, the magnificent poetical amplifications of his might and providence were of all ages: they were eternal poetry, because they were eternal truth. If the moral aspect of

Nil præter nubes et cœli numen adorant. Juv. xiv. 97.

Judæi mente solâ, unumque numen intelligunt. *** Summum

illud et æternum, neque mutabile,
neque interiturum. Tac. Hist. v. 5.
See Chap. II., in which this
question is resumed.

I.

CHAP. the Divine nature was more obscurely intimated, and, in this respect, had assumed the character of a local or national Deity, whose love was confined to the chosen people, and displayed itself chiefly in the beneficence of a temporal sovereign yet nothing was needed but to give a higher and more extensive sense to those types and shadows of universal wisdom; an improvement which the tendency of the age manifestly required; and which the Jews themselves, especially the Alexandrian school, had already attempted, by allegorising the whole annals of their people, and extracting a profound moral meaning from all the circumstances of their extraordinary history.*

Effects of

progress of

theism.

But the progress of knowledge was fatal to the knowledge popular religion of Greece and Rome. The aweupon poly- struck imagination of the older race, which had listened with trembling belief to the wildest fables, the deep feeling of the sublime and the beautiful, which, uniting with national pride, had assembled adoring multitudes before the Parthenon or the Jove of Phidias, now gave place to cold and sober reason. Poetry had been religion-religion was becoming mere poetry. Humanizing the Deity, and bringing it too near the earth, naturally produced, in a less imaginative and more reflecting

*Philo wrote for the unbe lievers among his own people, and to conciliate the Greeks. (De Conf. Linguar. vol. i. p. 405.) The same principle which among the heathens gave rise to the system of Euhemerus, who resolved all mythology into history, and that of the other

philosophers who attempted to reduce it to allegory, induced Philo, and no doubt his predecessor Aristobulus, thus to endeavour to accommodate the Mosaic history to an incredulous age, and to blend Judaism and Platonism into one harmonious system.

age, that familiarity which destroys respect. When man became more acquainted with his own nature, the less was he satisfied with deities cast in his own mould. In some respects the advancement of civilisation had no doubt softened and purified the old religions from their savage and licentious tendencies. Human sacrifices had ceased*, or had retired to the remotest parts of Germany, or to the shores of the Baltic. Though some of the secret rites were said to be defiled with unspeakable

* Human sacrifices sometimes, but rarely, occur in the earlier periods of Grecian history. According to Plutarch, Vit. Arist. 9. and Vit. Themistoclis, three sons of Sandauke, sister of the king of Persia, were offered, in obedience to an oracle, to Bacchus Omestes. The bloodstained altar of Diana of Tauris was placed by the tragedians in a barbarous region. Prisoners were sometimes slain on the tombs of warriors in much later times, as in the Homeric age, even on that of Philopomen. Plut. Vit. Philop. c. 21. Compare Tschirner, Fall des Heidenthums, p. 34.

Octavius is said (Suet. Vit. Octav.) to have sacrificed 300 Perugian captives on an altar sacred to the deified Julius (Divo Julio). This may be considered the sanguinary spirit of the age of proscriptions taking for once a more solemn and religious form. As to the libation of the blood of the gladiators, (see Tertullian, Apolog. c. 9. Scorpiac. 7. Cyprian, De Spectaculis. Compare Porphyr. de Abstin. Lactant. I—21.) I should agree with M. Constant in ascribing this ceremony to the barbarity of the Roman amusements rather than to their religion. All public spec

tacles were, perhaps, to a certain degree religious ceremonies; but the gladiators were the victims of the sanguinary pleasures of the Roman people, not slain in honour of their gods. Constant, iv. 335. Tschirner, p. 45.

Tac. Ann. i. 61. Tac. Germ. 10. 40. Compare on the gradual abolition of human sacrifices, Constant, iv. 330. The exception, which rests on the authority of Pliny, xxviii. 2., and Plutarch, Vita Marii. in init. Quæst. Rom., appears to me very doubtful. The prohibitory law of Lentulus, AU. DCLVII. and Livy's striking expression, more non Romano, concerning the sacrifice said to be continued to a late period, as well as the edict of Tiberius, promulgated in the remoter provinces, indicate the general sentiment of the time. Non satis æstimari potest quantum Romanis debeatur, qui sustulere monstra in quibus hominem occidere religiosissimum erat, mandi vero saluberrimum. Plin. H. N. xxx. 1. See in Ovid, Fasti, iii. 341. the reluctance of Numa to offer human sacrifice. Hadrian issued an edict prohibiting human sacrifices; this was directed, according to Creuzer, (Symb. i. 363.), against the later

I.

Beneficial.

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