termed a glory, sometimes with the Hebrew word for God inscribed there, as at the summit of the ladder in a picture of Jacob's dream. In other instances an eye surrounded by a glory is employed, as in one of the masonic symbols. Raphael, however, has ventured farther, and has painted the Almighty as a venerable old man, according to the idea which I have analysed in the preceding pages.

MYTHOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF GOD.

EXCEPT, I believe, among Jews, Protestant Christians, and Mahometans, image worship has prevailed in all ages and nations of the world. The idea of God as derived from the person of man, has accordingly been the leading principle upon which such images have been formed; though the idea has undergone in many instances very singular modifications, both in the peculiarity of figure and in the number of deities conceived; for it seems to be of the very nature of image-worship to multiply its objects.

Egyptian Representations.

In all cases where a belief in a multiplicity of gods has prevailed, one is represented as a chief or sovereign over the others. In ancient Egypt, accordingly, though as in Thebes, for example, Ammon (the Jupiter of the Greeks) appears to have been reckoned the superior deity, in most parts of Egypt this honour was conferred on Osiris, who is represented in human form.

Plutarch, Juvenal, and Tibullus, represent Osiris as the son of Jupiter and Niobe; but whether this was the doctrine held by the Egyptians themselves is, I think, somewhat doubtful; for the accounts which are given by the Greeks are so much blended with their

own philosophy as to weaken thereby any dependence on their fidelity and accuracy.

The gods of the Egyptians were so numerous that it would require a volume to enumerate them. They scrupled not indeed, it is said, to worship the lowliest plants and the vilest reptiles; and yet we have undeniable testimony, both sacred and profane, that they were superior to all other nations in learning. The

accounts given us of their religion, however, are very contradictory, perhaps from the difference in opinion of the vulgar and the priests, or in the authors on whose details we are forced to depend; for authors constantly misunderstand what they meet with out of their own country.

Though, then, we reject the testimony of Lucian and Juvenal, as to the Egyptians worshipping leeks and garlic, we cannot so easily pass over that of Philo, who expressly says they worship dogs and crocodiles. Cicero also mentions the cat and the ibis along with the dog and the crocodile. What kind of worship they paid to these is nowhere told us. Cicero says that while the Romans had frequently violated temples and images, it was never known that a cat or a crocodile had been profaned in Egypt.

It occurs to me that this idolatry with which the Egyptians have been so loudly and so often charged, may have been nothing more than what is at the present day shown by the Hindoos to crocodiles, cows, and other animals; or perhaps it may even be brought home to ourselves, and the red-breast, the swallow, and the house-cricket, might by a Chinese or a Mexican traveller be mentioned among the gods worshipped in Britain, because it is here very commonly deemed unlucky to molest these animals. Such a mistake as this has, I believe, more than once falsified the accounts

we have received of foreign nations. Missionaries and religious travellers, in particular, are, from the very habits of their mind, peculiarly liable to make such mistakes; and we ought to receive the accounts which they give us of distant nations with great caution, and with much allowance for their previous habits of thinking and observation. Mr. Hume, in his Natural History of Religion, when adverting to the worship of cats in Egypt, says that if none of the kittens were destroyed, a pair of cats would, in fifty years, have overstocked the kingdom; and infers that only the fullgrown cats must have been adored, and that the little sucking gods must have been drowned.

The worship said to have been paid to garlic, and other plants may, perhaps, be referrible to the practice of hieroglyphic writing; which art being sacred, the vulgar might hence pay reverence to the things thus symbolised-such as leeks, the serpent, and others. From an inscription on a temple of Neitha, it has been said that the knowledge of one God prevailed among the priests, though concealed from the vulgar; but if so, why was this inscription placed on the front of a temple? This inscription is translated by Proclus :-" I am whatever is, or has been, or will be, and no mortal has withdrawn my veil-my offspring is the sun." But how can we be sure that the translation given by Proclus is correct? and if it be correct, how are we to account for the Egyptians paying idolatrous worship to deceased heroes? Should we credit Mr. Hume, who says, if once men believe one Supreme Being, they can never verge again into the worship of many gods, termed polytheism*. But Mr. Hume must surely have forgotten his knowledge of history in making such an

," and Otos, "Gods."

From the Greek Пoλus, many,"

assertion; for of the Bible shows how prone every page the Jews were to fall into polytheism; and even the wise Solomon, who could not be ignorant of the unity of God, paid divine honours to Moloch, the evil demon of the Ammonites, as Milton says:

"The wisest heart

Of Solomon, he led by fraud to build

His temple right against the temple of God."

PARADISE LOST.

In later times, we find the Mahometans transferring to their prophet the reverence they had been taught by him to pay to God. This mode of proceeding, indeed, is natural to man, for we uniformly see that more court is paid to the attendants and favourites of princes and great men than to themselves.

Hindoo Representations.

A similar opinion with that which prevailed in ancient Egypt, of a superior God and a multitude of inferior divinities, obtains at this day in India—an opinion, however, not recent, but of great antiquity, as we learn from the erudite, and no less ingenious papers of Sir William Jones. The Hindoos call their chief god Bramah; but he, or rather it (for Bramah is in the neuter gender), has, like the Jupiter of the ancients, a great number of appellations. Bramah, like the Egyptian Osiris, is represented in a human form, but with the peculiar characteristics of the Hindoo deities.

Greek and Roman Representations.

The mythological deities of the Greeks and Romans are so universally known, that I need do little more than call the attention of the beginner to the human form of their chief divinity, Zeus, or Jupiter, as agreeing with the analysis above given of the idea of God.

Homer and Hesiod, the oldest classical writers, concur with the rest of the authors of Greece and Rome in placing one God at the head of all the rest. Hesiod seems to think that all the gods (according to him 30,000 in number) were coëval with the earth and heavens, Jove having been the only self-active god of all, and from Jove all the others sprung. But though Jove was the chief god, the inferior deities were not subject to his controul, for they were all separated into caballing parties; and when Jove called them to order, it was thought to be an assumption of prerogative which did not belong to him, and an instance of tyranny.

One set of modern authors maintain that this chief deity, Jove, or whatever he is called, was the true supreme God: another party maintain that it is not So. At first view it might be thought absurd, and not a little paradoxical, to say that the polytheist of antiquity held the unity of the deity, yet is easy to maintain it very plausibly, if we permit the prover to take such passages as support him, and leave out all which are against him. Dr. Sykes, in his Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, goes farther, and strenuously maintains that the ancients were no more polytheists than we are, who believe in a host of angels, good and bad. A French author, M. Septchene, says the Greeks represented Jove as truly as God is represented in the Bible; but it is much easier to make such an assertion than to prove it. The strongest proofs are from Orpheus and Horace. Orpheus says that "God is an unoriginated Being;" but the same Orpheus, or whoever wrote the Orphic verses, takes occasion to say the very same thing of the sun, and also of Bacchus; and Origen tells us that this same Orpheus wrote more impious fables of the gods than

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