Israel the line of his inheritance, and not only says this, but also omits to add, I think, you shall not revile the Gods, the detestable wickedness and audacity of those in after times, wishing to take away all religious reverence from the multitude, thought that not to worship should be followed by blaspheming the Gods. This you have alone thence derived; but there is no similitude in any thing else between you and them. Hence, from the innovation of the Hebrews, you have seized blasphemy towards the venerable Gods; but from our religion you have cast aside reverence to every nature more excellent than man, and the love of paternal institutes.”
“So great an apprehension indeed, says Dr. Stillingfleet,[1] had the Heathens of the necessity of appropriate acts of divine worship, that some of them have chosen to die, rather than to give them to what they did not believe to be God. We have a remarkable story to this purpose in Arrian and Curtius[2] concerning Callisthenes. Alexander arriving at that degree of vanity, as to desire to have divine worship given him, and the matter being started out of design among the courtiers, either by Anaxarchus, as Arrian, or Cleo the Sicilian, as Curtius says; and the way of doing it proposed, viz. by incense and prostration; Callisthenes vehemently opposed it, as that which would confound the difference of human and divine worship, which had been preserved inviolable among them. The worship of the Gods had been kept up in temples, with altars, and images, and sacrifices, and hymns, and prostrations, and such like; but it is by no means fitting, says he, for us to confound these things, either by lifting up men to the honours of the Gods, or depressing the Gods to the honours of men. For neither would Alexander suffer any man to usurp his royal dignity by the votes of men; how much more justly may the Gods disdain for any man to take their honours to himself. And it appears by Plutarch,[3] that the Greeks thought it a mean and base thing for any of them, when sent on an embassy to the kings of Persia, to prostrate themselves before them, because this was only allowed among them in divine adoration. Therefore, says he, when Pelopidas and Ismenias were sent to Artaxerxes, Pelopidas did nothing unworthy, but Ismenias let fall his ring to the ground, and stooping for that was thought to make his adoration; which was altogether as good a shift as the Jesuits advising the crucifix to be held in the Mandarins’ hands while they made their adorations in the Heathen temples in China.
“Conon[4] also refused to make his adoration, as a disgrace to his city; and Isocrates[5] accuses
