No ship is called by the name of Glaucus because he offended a deity.[1]
Arts also have their patron divinity. Phœbus-Apollo inspires the Poet and Artist; the Muses—Daughters of Memory and Jove—fire the bosom from their golden urn of truth;[2] Thor, Ares, Mars, have power in war; a sober virgin-goddess directs the useful arts of life; a deity presides over agriculture, the labours of the smith, the shepherd, the weaver, and each art of Man. He defends men engaged in these concerns. Every nation, city, or family has its favourite God—a Zeus, Athena, Juno, Odin, Baal, Jehovah, Osiris, or Melkartha, who is supposed to be partial to the nation which is his “chosen people.” Now perhaps no nation ever believed in many separate, independent, absolute deities. All the Gods are not of equal might. One is King of all, the God of Gods, who holds the others with an iron sway. Sometimes he is the All-Father; sometimes the All-Fate, which, in some ages, seems to be made a substitute for the one true God.[3] Each naţion thinks its own chief God greater than the Gods of all other nations; or, in time of war, seeks to seduce the hostile Gods by sacrifice, promise of temples and cere-
- ↑ Herodotus, Lib. VI. 86, relates the beautiful story of Glaucus, so full of moral truth. Compare with it, Zechariah v. 3, 4, Job xv. 20, et seq., xviii. et seq., where the same beautiful and natural sentiment appears.
- ↑ See the strange pantheistic account of the origin and history of Gods and all things in the Orphic poems and Mythology. These have been collected and treated of with great discrimination by Lobeck, Aglaophamus, Vol. I. p. 473, et seq. See the more summary account in Brandis, Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. I. p. 60, et seq. There are some valuable thoughts in Creutzer's Review of the new edition of Cornutus, De Nat. Deorum, in Theol. Stud. und Kritiken für 1846, p. 208, et seq.
- ↑ Men must believe in somewhat that to them is Absolute; if their conception of the Deity be imperfect, they unavoidably retreat to a somewhat Superior to the Deity. Thus for every detect in the popular conception of Zeus, some new power is added to Fate. “It is impossible even for God to escape Fate,” said Herodotus. See also Cudworth, Ch. I. 9.1—3, Zenophanes makes a sharp distinction between God and the Gods. See in Clem. Alex. Strom. V. p. 601, and the remarks of Brandis, ubi sup., Vol. I. p. 361, et seq. note; see also Vol. II. p. 340, et seq. See too Cornutus (or Phurnutus) De Nat. Deorum in Gale, Opusc. Mythologica, &c., Amst. 1688.
in the history of human conceptions of God, for these are necessarily progressive. See Aristotle, Metaphysica, XIV. p. 1000, et seq., Opp. II., ed. Duval, Par. 1629. See Hesiod's Theogony everywhere, and note the progress of the divine species from Chaos and Earth to the moral divinities, Eunomia, Dike, Eirene, &c. In some of the Oriental theogonies, the rule was inverted, the first emanation was the best. See Warton, History of English Poetry, Lond. 1824, Vol. I., Pref. by the Editor.
