the evident origin, as he thinks, of our own term God. Hamlet's cloud, "almost in shape of a camel, backed like a weasel, or very like a whale," is, I think, a good emblem of such fancies.

There have been several other explanations of mythology proposed at different times by the ingenious; but most of them are equally fanciful with this one of Bryant. For example, the Abbé Foucher, in his Researches, has discovered that the Supreme God frequently in ancient times descended upon earth and appeared in the likeness of the famous heroes of antiquity, and from these descents, or, as the Hindoos term them, Avatars, of the divinity, he thinks all the fables of mythology originated.

M. Le Clerc, again, in his notes on Hesiod, thinks that the proper account of the matter is, that the gods of mythology were all merchants and traders, and all their fabled exploits nothing but mercantile adventures disguised by poetry and fiction.

This, however, is sober sense compared with the theory of the Abbé Bergier, who, rejecting Hardouin's opinion that Hercules was Moses, undertakes to demonstrate that this same Hercules was nothing more than a large causeway to prevent rivers from overflowing their banks, which rivers have been fabled to be serpents, boars, and lions, which he destroyed. In the same spirit, M. Bergier imagines Jupiter to be rain, which impregnated Semele, a fountain, which brought forth Bacchus, a marsh; and Prometheus he fancies to have been-not a man-but a batch of potter's clay; the eagle that preyed on his liver, the fire of a pottery kiln; and Mount Caucasus the hearth, or rather the kiln itself.

The Abbé Pluche, so well known for his Spectacle de la Nature, refers all mythology to the worship, in

the first instance, of the heavenly bodies; and so far I think he is right; for the sun, the visible giver of life, must naturally be the first object of a savage's adoration; and history gives this as a fact of frequent occurrence. Yet I would not go so far as the Abbé in referring all mythology to sun and planet worship. The author of the article in the French Encyclopædia frankly says, that no analysis can be given not full of contradictions and inconsistencies; and perhaps this is the true state of the matter.

Modern Mythology.

According to the ancient mythology, every country, every kingdom, every province, had a god or goddess to preside over their affairs; nay, every river and every forest had some divinity which either presided there, or made there an occasional residence. Now this fable the ancients as firmly believed as we believe that there is no proof of it whatever. But though nobody now believes this in the enlightened nations of Europe, yet there are still allusions made to it by our poets and orators, and representations made of it by our painters and statuaries. Nobody now believes in the existence of an imaginary goddess called Britannia, whose business it is to watch over the interests and the prosperity of Britain; nor in the existence of another imaginary divinity called Hibernia, whose peculiar attention is directed to Ireland, and who amuses herself, when not oppressed with employment, in playing on a golden harp. All this is a pretty enough fancy -an elegant, a beautiful fable, which natural theology disclaims and reason revolts from; yet in defiance of both, painters will paint their Britannias and their Hibernias, and poets and orators will talk of them as real and embodied divinities, and statuaries will make

allegorical groups of them, and the artists of the mint will emblazon them on coins and medallions, thereby perpetuating heathenism after it has everywhere else disappeared.

It is here worthy of remark, that the ancient poets and the ancient painters all believed in the existence of their gods and goddesses, in their muses and nymphs of the fields, woods, and rivers; the Athenians in their Minerva, and the Ephesians in their Diana; and, being in earnest in their belief, they could easily persuade others into the same, from a common and wellknown principle of human nature'. Not so the modern imitator; he neither believes himself in what he pretends to represent as a goddess, nor does he seem to care whether any body believe it or not. Nobody will believe or even listen with patience to a hypocrite when he scarcely takes the trouble to disguise his hypocrisy. Hence it is that nobody gives credit to the existence or the divinity of the modern poet's muse; for he himself does not give credit to it, nor ever demands it of us, but puts on an awkward and sheepish air in his warmest addresses to this imaginary and uninteresting thing, or rather no-thing, which he calls a muse. In the classical ages, on the contrary, the poet's invocation to his muse had an interest and a charm, because he was warmly in earnest, and spread around him the contagion of his enthusiasm.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHERS.

On examining the representations given of the Deity by the philosophical sects of the ancients, we shall find them to be little different, when carefully traced, from

(1) This will be explained in the ALPHABET OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

those of Mythology, though they be put forth in a somewhat different manner and under different terms.

Before mentioning any particular opinions of the philosophers, it is of importance to premise that none of them pretended to have invented their systems; for they were not, like modern philosophers, retired and speculative men, but extensive travellers, and industrious collectors of traditionary tenets, as all of them repeatedly acknowledge; and the traveller who brought the newest and best stock of traditions from Egypt and the East, was looked upon as the chief Philosopher. Plato was a travelling merchant in Egypt and Judæa, in the latter of which he expressly says he learned that the origin of man was from the earth; and he also says that his knowledge of the Gods was all from these traditions. This it is necessary to bear in mind, that we may not think the glimmerings of truth, occasionally to be found in the writings of these philosophers, were discovered by their unassisted reason, which, when they trusted to it, frequently led them into puerilities that could scarcely be credited, had we not their own words in proof.

I would also premise that in the writings of the philosophers, the singular nouns Theos and Deus, which we unthinkingly translate " God," would be more properly translated "Godhead," as for the most part the terms mean all the Gods in a body taken collectively. At Rome Deus meant a "Godhead" of 280,000 divinities, according to what Praxileus declared in the senate; in Greece, Theos, according to Hesiod, meant 30,000 Gods in one body. Cicero says, for example, " This indeed comes to pass in God out of whom they are understood to be happy and eternal 1", making a marked

(1) Hoc idem fieri in Deo ex quo esse beati et æterni, intelli. gantur,

transition from the singular to the plural. Again he makes Botta say "You think that God" (or rather the Godhead) "does not exist in one substance or remain the same in number."

Numerous similar examples could easily be collected, and form a sufficient answer to those who think, when they meet with the same word in ancient writers as in the Bible, that it must have the same meaning. Seneca, for example, almost uses the same words as St. Paul, when he says" God is near to thee and with thee and within thee'," but every body knows that Seneca was a Stoic, and believed God to be nothing more than the soul of the world, which even Spinoza and the rest of the atheists come near to assert. "There is only one cause," says Bayle, "the first universal eternal, which exists by necessity, and which ought to be called God;" but this we soon find is nothing in his opinion but matter-the earth or the universe.

Thales, the chief of the Ionic sect of Philosophers, thought that the universe was animated by a universal principle, and that the stars were actually alive from the same cause. Pythagoras also, Aristotle, and many others, believed in this planetary animation. Aristotle, indeed, expressly enjoins the worship of the stars, which he calls living animals. Plato, also, on the same principle, repeatedly prescribes the worship of the planets. The Stoics went farther, and asserted that the stars and planets are nourished by the exhalations of our seas and rivers, and that the planetary motions are caused by their searching about for food. This is not so surprising as that Tycho Brahe, Lord Herbert, and other

(1) Prope est ad te Deus, tecum est, intus est.

(2) Il y a une cause première universelle eternelle, qui existe necessairement, et qui doit être appellée Dieu,