real belief of the people and the priest, and not a verbal form, as in the decline of the old worship. Stout hearts could look forward to a wider sphere in the untrod world of spirit, where they should wield the sceptre of command and sit down with the immortal Gods, renewed in never-ending youth. The examples of Æacus, Minos, Rhadamanthus, of Bacchus and Hercules—mortals promoted to the Godhead by merit, and not birth—crowned the ambition of the aspiring.[1] The kindred belief that the soul, dislodged from its “fleshly nook,” still had an influence on the affairs of men, and came, a guardian spirit, to bless mankind, was a powerful auxiliary in a rude state of religious growth—a notion which has not yet faded out of the civilized world.[2] This worship seems unaccountable in our times; but when such men were supposed to be descendants of the Gods, or born miraculously, and sustained by superhuman beings; or mediators between them and the human race; when it was believed they in life had possessed celestial powers, or were incarnations of some deity or heavenly spirit, the transition to their Apotheosis is less violent and absurd; it follows as a natural result. The divine being is more glorious when he has shaken off the robe of flesh.[3] Certain it is, this belief was clung to with astonishing tenacity, and, under several forms, still retains its place in the Christian church.[4]
The moral effect of Polytheism, on the whole, is difficult to understand. However, it is safe to say it is greater than that of Fetichism. The constant evil of war in public, and slavery in private; the arbitrary character assigned to the Gods; the influence of the priesthood, laying more stress on the ritual and the creed than on the life; the exceeding outwardness of many popular forms of worship; the constant separation made between Religion
- ↑ Pausanias touchingly complains that in his day mortals no longer became gods. See Lib. VII. Ch. ii. Opp. ed. Schubert and Walz. III. p. 9.
- ↑ The Christians began at an early age to imitate this, as well as other parts of the old polytheistic system. Eusebius, P. E. XIII. 11; Augustine, De Civ. Dei, VIII. 27.
- ↑ On this subject, see Meiners, ubi sup., Vol. I. B. III. Ch. i. and ii.
- ↑ See in Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Ch. XLVII. § iii., the lament of Serapion at the loss of his concrete Gods. But it was only the Arian notions that deprived him of his finite God. Jerome condemns the Anthropomorphism of the Polytheists as stultissimam hæresin, but believed the divine incarnation in Jesus. See also Prudentius Apotheosis, Opp. I. p. 430, et seq., London, 1824.
