Thus, as he reflects back upon his own image conceptions of the Deity, the picture that he draws first fails in that, wherein he himself is weakest. Now, the perception of mere power depends upon intellect and sense: and as neither intellect nor sense have received through sin the same absolutely mortal wound which has reached his spiritual being, he can therefore still comprehend with clearness the idea and the uses of power, both mental and physical. Accordingly, the Godhead is for him preternaturally endowed with intelligence and force. But how was he to keep alive from his own resources the moral elements of the divine ideal? Coercive goodness, goodness by an external law, goodness dependent upon responsibility, was, by the nature of the case, inapplicable to Deity as such: while of goodness by an internal law, he had lost all clear conception, and he could not give what he had not got.
Of course it is not meant, that this was a conscious operation. Rarely indeed, in reflective and critical periods, does it happen that man can keep a log-book of wind, weather, and progress, for the mind, or tell from what quarter of the heavens have proceeded the gales that impel it on its course.
But, by this real though unconscious process, goodness would soon disappear from his conception of the Godhead, while high power and intelligence might remain. And hence it is not strange, if we find that Homer’s deities, possessed of power beyond their faculty of moral direction, are for the most part, when viewed in the sphere of their personal conduct, on a lower level than his heroes.
When therefore these latter charge, as is not unfrequent with them, upon the gods the consequences, and even in a degree the facts, of their own fault or folly, the proceeding is not so entirely illogical as we might at first suppose. For that great conception of an all-good and all-wise Being had undergone a miserable transmutation, bringing it more and more towards the form of an evil power. Hence, perhaps, it is that we find these reproaches to the Deity put into the mouth even of Menelaus, one of the noblest and purest characters among the heroes of Homer[14].
Again, this degradation of the divine idea was essentially connected with the parcelling it out into many portions, according to the system of polytheism. That system at once brought down all the attributes from their supreme perfection to scales of degree: established finite and imperfect relations in lieu of the perfect and infinite: carried into the atmosphere of heaven an earthy element. The disintegration of the Unity of God prepared the way for the disintegration of His several attributes, and especially for weakening and effacing those among them, which man had chiefly lost his capacity to grasp.
When once we have substituted for the absolute that which is in degree, and for the perfect that which is defective, we have brought the divine element within the cognizance of the human: the barrier of separation is broken down, and, without any consciousness of undue license, we thenceforward insensibly fashion it as we please. Each corruption, as it takes its place in the scheme of popular ideas, is consolidated by the action of new forces, over and above those which, even if alone, were sufficient to engender it: for the classes, who worked the machinery both of priestly caste, and of civil government, found their account in accumulating fable up to a mountain mass. Each new addition found a welcome: but woe to him, who, by shaking the popular persuasion of any one article, endangered the very foundations of the whole.
Such is an outline, though a faint and rude one, of what may be called the rationale, or the law of cause and effect, applicable to the explanation of the progressive and, at length, total corruption of the primitive religion.
Inducements to Nature-worship.
We may also endeavour to trace the motives which might determine the downward movement of the human mind in the direction, partially or wholly according to circumstances, of what is called Nature-worship.