On the one side lay the proposition handed down from the beginning—there is a God. On the other side arose the question—where is He? It was felt that on the whole He was not in man, though there was in man what was of Him. It was obvious to look for Him in the mighty agencies, and in the sublime objects of Nature, which, though (so thought might run,) they did not reveal Him entirely, yet disclosed nothing that was not worthy to belong to Him. Here is a germ of Nature-worship. Hence it is that we find Aristotle, at a period when thought was alike acute, deliberate, and refined, declare it to be beyond all doubt that the heavenly bodies are far more divine than man[15].
Now this germ could not be one only. Trains of thought and reasoning, essentially alike, would, according to diversities of minds and circumstances, lead one to place the God in one natural sphere or agency, and another to place him in another. There was no commanding principle either to confine or to reconcile these variations; thus the same cause, which brought deity into natural objects, would also tend to exhibit many gods instead of one.
Such was the path by which man might travel from Theism to Nature-worship. But other paths, starting from other points, would lead to the same issue.
Suppose now the case of the mind wholly without the tradition of a God. To such a mind, the vast and overmastering but usually regulated forces, and the beautiful and noble forms of nature, would of themselves suggest the idea of a superior agency; yet, again, not of one superior agent alone, but of many. Thus some men would build upwards, while others, so to speak, were building downwards, and they would meet on the way.
And, again, a third operation could not but assist these two former, and combine with their results. For the unaided intellect of man seems not to have had stamina to carry, as it were, the weight of the transcendent idea of one God, of God infinite in might, in wisdom, and in love. Again, it was awful as well as ponderous; because it was so remote from man, and from his actual state. He therefore lightened the idea, as it were, by dividing it from one into many; and he brought it nearer to himself, nearer to his sympathies, by humanizing its form and attributes. By this process he in time destroyed indeed his reverence, but he also beguiled his fears, and created for himself objects not of dread, so much as of familiar association.
Yet once again; it may, I think, be shown that a kind of natural necessity led man to denominate actual powers, which he saw and felt about him, not through the medium of generalization by abstract names, but by making them persons.
Thus easy, and almost inevitable, under mental laws, was the road to Nature-worship. The path, that led into the deeper corruption of Passion-worship, has been already traced.
Progressive deterioration.
It is then in entire accordance with what has preceded, that, when the Pagan system has come into its old age, we should find it so wholly deprived of all the lineaments of original beauty, grandeur, and goodness, that we can read the destructive philosophy and poetry of the atheistic schools, and of Lucretius in particular, without the strong sentiment of horror, which in themselves they are fitted to excite.
Milton, in the First Book of Paradise Lost, treats the Pagan gods as being, under new names, so many of the fallen angels, who with Satan had rebelled, and with him had been driven out from heaven, so that the world of heathen from the first had simply