ANTHROPOMORPHITES.
They are said to have been a small sect of the fourth century, but they were rather the sect of every people that had painters and sculptors. As soon as they could draw a little, or shape a figure, they made an image of the Divinity. If the Egyptians consecrated cats and gnats they also sculptured Isis and Osiris. Bel was carved at Babylon, Hercules at Tyre, Brahma in India.
The Mussulmans did not paint God as a man. The Guebres had no image of the Great Being. The Sabean Arabs, did not give the human figure to the stars. The Jews did not give it to God in their temple. None of these nations cultivated the art of design, and if Solomon placed figures of animals in his temple it is likely that he had them carved at Tyre; but all the Jews have spoken of God as of a man.
Although they had no images they seem to have made God a man on all occasions. He comes down into the garden; He walks there every day at noon; He talks to His creatures; He talks to the serpent; He makes Himself heard by Moses in the bush; He shows him only His back parts on the mountain; He nevertheless talks to him, face to face, like one friend to another.
In the Koran, too, God is always looked up to as a king. In the twelfth chapter, a throne is given Him above the waters. He had this Koran written by a secretary, as kings have their orders. He sent this same Koran to Mahomet by the angel Gabriel, as kings communicate their orders through the great officers of the crown. In short, although God is declared in the Koran to be neither begetting nor begotten, there is, nevertheless a morsel of anthropomorphism. In the Greek and Latin Churches, God has always been painted with a great beard.
ANTI-LUCRETIUS.
The reading of the whole poem of the late Cardinal Polignac has confirmed me in the idea which I formed of it when he read to me the first book. I am moreover astonished, that amidst the dissipations of the world and the troubles in public life, he should have been able to write a long work in verse, in a foreign language; he, who could hardly have made four good lines in his own tongue. It seems to me that he often united the strength of Lucretius and the elegance of Virgil. I admire him, above all, for that facility with which he expresses such difficult things.
Perhaps, indeed, his "Anti-Lucretius" is too diffuse, and too little diversified, but he is here to be examined as a philosopher, not as a poet. It appears to me that so fine a mind as his should have done more justice to the morals of Epicurus, who, though he was a very bad natural philosopher, was, nevertheless, a very worthy man and always taught mildness, temperance, moderation, and justice, virtues which his example inculcated still more forcibly.
In the "Anti-Lucretius," this great man is thus apostrophized: