His Paul of Tarsus finds, in the city of Athens, an altar erected to the Unknown Gods;* and taking what Le Clerc considers a justifiable liberty with the inscription, compliments the citizens on such a proof of their predisposition to receive the God whom he propounded to them, or any other, as well without evidence as with it, and to be converted without putting him to the trouble of a miracle. Acts xvii. 22. The inhabitants of Lystra, upon only hearing of the most equivocal and suspicious case of wonderment that could well be imagined, even that a lame beggar, who might have been hired for the purpose, or probably had never been lame at all, had been cured, or imagined himself cured, by two entire strangers, itinerant Therapeutæ, or tramping quack-doctors, without either inquiry or doubt, set up the cry, "That Jupiter and Mercury were come down from heaven in the shape of these quack-doctors;" and with all the doctors themselves could do to check the intensity of their devotion, "scarce restrained they the people that they had not done sacrifice."-Acts xiv. 18. *“Quamvis plurali numero legeretur inscriptio ayvwOTOLS EOs recte de Deo Ignoto, locutus est Paulus. Quia plurali numero continetur singularis."-Cleric. H. G. A. 52. p. 374. There is sufficient evidence, however, that Paul read the inscription correctly; so that the commentator's ready quibble is not called for. The various translations given of this text, make a good specimen of the difficulty of coming at the real sense of any ancient legends. THE GREEK. Σταθεις δε ο Παυλος εν μεσω το αρει8παγε έφη ανδρες Αθηναιοι κατα παντα ως δεισιδαιμονεστερες υμας θεωρω. THE LATIN. Stans autem Paulus in medio Areopagi, ait, Viri Athenensis, per omnia quasi superstitiones vos aspicio. 1. DR. LARDNER'S TRANSLATION. "Paul, therefore, standing up in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are in all things very religious.” 2. UNITARIAN VERSION. "Then Paul stood in the midst of the court of Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are exceedingly addicted to the worship of demons," 3. ARCHBISHOP NEWCOMB'S VERSION. Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are somewhat too religious." 4. COMMON VERSION. "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious." These various translators, however, did not mean exactly to discover, that religion and superstition were convertible terms.-Six, is one thing, and half a dozen is another. CHAPTER IV. THE STATE OF THE JEWS. THE grand exception to the harmonious universalism of religions, and to that entire prevalence, as far as religion was concerned, of "peace on earth and good will among men," which arose from the practical conviction of a sentiment which had passed into a common proverb, "DEORUM INJURIE, DIIS CURE," that "The wrongs of the gods were the concerns of the gods," "occurred among a melancholy and misanthropic horde of exclusively superstitious barbarians, who, from their own and the best account that we have of them, were colonized from their captivity, by a Babylonian prince, on the sterile soil of Judea, about twenty-three hundred years ago; and, by the exclusive, unsocial, and uncivilized character of their superstition, were exposed to frequent wars and final dispersion. The exclusive character of their superstition, and the constant intermarriage with their own caste or sect, have, to this day, preserved to them, in all countries, a distinct character. These barbarians, who resented the consciousness of their inferiority in the scale of rational being, by an invincible hatred of the whole human race, being without wit or invention to devise to themselves any original system of theology, adopted from time to time the various conceits of the various nations, by whom their rambling and predatory tribes had been held in subjugation. They plagiarized the religious legends of the nations, among whom their characteristic idleness and inferiority of understanding had caused them to be vagabonds; and pretended that the furtive patchwork was a system of theology intended by heaven for their exclusive benefit. There is, however, nothing extraordinary in this; the miserable and the wretched always seek to console themselves for the absence of real advantages, by an imaginary counterbalance of spiritual privilege. An' let them be the caterers, they shall always be the favourites of Omnipotence, and their afflictions in this world, shall be to be overpaid with a "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory," in another. In some instances it will be found, that the means of detecting the original idea has been washed down the stream of time. The Jews, who, probably, always were, as they are at present, the old-clothes-men of the world, have had but little difficulty in scratching up a sufficient freshness of nap upon borrowed or stolen theology, to disguise its original character. Very often, however, has their idleness betrayed their policy, and left us scarcely so much as an alteration of names to put us to the trouble of a doubt. They give us the story of the sacrifice of Ipthegenia, the daughter of Agamemnon, as an original legend of a judge of Israel, who had immolated his daughter to Yahouh, or JAO, without so much as respecting the wish to be deceived, not even being at the pains to vary the name of the heroine of the fable. By a division of the syllables into two words, Ipthi-geni is literally Jeptha's daughter; and even the name of Moses himself, as it stands in the Greek text, is composed of the same consonant letters as MISES, the Arabian name of Bacchus, of whom precisely the same adventures were related, and believed, many ages before there existed a race known on earth as the nation of Israel, or any individual of that nation capable of committing either truth or falsehood to written documents. There have been dancing bears, sagacious pigs, and learned horses in the world, but the Jews are as innocent as any of them of the faculty of original invention. Their strong man (Samson) carrying away the gates of Gaza, is scarcely a various reading from the story of Hercules' pillars at Gades, Cades, or Cadiz. That this melancholy race of rambling savages had derived the principal features of their theology from the deities of Egypt, is demonstrable from the literal identity of the name of the god of Memphis, Jao, with that of the boasted god of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, who are each of them believed to have been either natives or very long residents of that country. Moses himself, on the face of their own report, was confessedly an Egyptian priest. The Jewish Elohim were the decans of the Egyptians; the same as the genii of the months and planets among the Persians and Chaldeans; and JAO, or Yahouh, considered merely as one of these beings generically called Elohim or Alehim, appears to have been only a national or topical deity. We find one of the presidents of the Jewish horde, negociating with a king of the Amorites, precisely on these terms of a common understanding between them. "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh, thy Alehim, giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever JAO, our Alehim, shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.' ""* Nor is it at all concealed, that the power of Jao, as much as of any other topical god, was confined to the province over which he presided. "The JAO Alehim of Israel, fought for Israel,† and JAO drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." The God of Israel was no match for the tutelary deities of the valley. The first commandment of the decalogue involves a virtual recognition of the existence, and rival, if not equal claims of other deities. "Thou shalt have none other gods but me," is no mandate that could have issued from one who had been entirely satisfied of his own supremacy, and that those to whom he had once revealed himself, were in no danger of giving a preference to the idols of the Gentiles. To say nothing of the highest implied compliment to those idols, in the confession of JAO, that he was jealous of his people's attachment. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God," Exod. xx. He was Lord of heaven and earth, &c. in such sense as the Emperor of China, the Grand Sultan, &c.,-by courtesy. It would be difficult to imagine, and surely impossible to find, among all the formularies of ancient Paganism, any manner of speaking ascribed to their deities more truly contemptible, more engregiously absurd and revolting to common sense, than the language which their lively oracles put into the mouth of their deity. Sometimes he is described as roaring like a lion, at others as hissing like a snake, as burning with rage, and unable to restrain his own passions, as kicking, smiting, cursing, swearing, smelling, vomiting, repenting, being grieved at his heart, his fury coming up in his face, his nostrils smoking, &c. For which our Christian divines have invented the apology, "that these things are spoken thus, in accommodation to the weakness of human conceptions," and avados as humanly suffering; without, however, allowing benefit of the same apology, to throw any sort of palliation over the grossnesses of the literal sense of the Pagan theology. It is well known, that the Pagan wor * Judges xi. 24. † Joshua x. 42. Judges i. 19. And note well, that this Chemosh, called in I. Kings xi. 7. the abomination of Moab, is none other than the Christian Messiah, or Sun of Righteousness, of Malachi iii. 20, or iv. 2. ship by no means involved such a real prostration of intellect, and such an absolute surrender of the senses and reason, as is involved in the Christian notion of paying divine honours. It often meant no more than a habit of holding the thing so said to be worshipped, in a particular degree of attachment, as many Christians carry about them a lucky penny, or a curious pebble, keepsakes or mementos of past prosperity, or something which is to recall to their minds those agreeable associations of idea, which Thus the Egyptian's worship of onions, however at first view ridiculous and childish, and exposing him to the scorn and sarcasm both of Christian and Heathen satirists;* in his own view and representation of the matter, (which surely is as fairly to be taken into the account as the representations of those who would never give themselves the trouble to investigate what had once moved their laughter,) by no means implied that he took the onion itself to be a god, or forgot or neglected its culinary uses as a vegetable. The respect he paid to it referred to a high and mystical order of astronomical speculations, and was purely emblematical. The onion presented to the eye of the Egyptian visionary, the most curious type in nature of the disposition and arrangement of the great solar system. "Supposing the root and top of the head to represent the two poles, if you cut any one transversely or diagonally, you will find it divided into the same number of spheres, including each other, counting from the sun or centre to the circumference, as they knew the motions or courses of the orbs (or planets) divided the fluid system of the heavens into; and so the divisions represented the courses of those orbs." This observation of Mr. Hutchinsont has since been made or borrowed by Dr. Shaw, who observes, that "the onion, upon account of the root of it, which consists of many coats enveloping each other, like the orbs (orbits) in the planetary system, was another of their sacred vegetables." Our use of these observations, how* Porrum et cepe nefas violare et frangere morsu. O sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis Numina ! Juvenal Sat. 15. lin. 9. 11. A sin, forsooth, to violate and break by biting the leek and onions. A holy people, in whose gardens these divinities are born! f His works, vol. 4. p. 262. Shaw's Travels, p. 356. |