dom previous to the fall, and it does so, the statements and reasonings of the Bible are such, that we can, without doing them the slightest injustice, cheerfully grant it, which we now do, with a conscience void of offence towards God's word. May we not now conclude, that the sweetest harmony exists between the word and the works of God?

ANCIENT RELIGIONS.

IN nothing have mankind shown their waywardness so much as in religion. Originally possessed of a revelation from the Creator, they quickly forgot it. Sunk in vicious indulgences, they did not even wish to remember it; and it is held probable that the great antediluvian apostasy was atheism. Starting afresh on their career, after the deluge, the human race again lost their divine revelation, or obscured it by the inventions of an ignorant fancy. The great error into which they then fell was polytheism. Man, placed on earth, and imbued with an adoring spirit, began to magnify the objects by which he was surrounded; and, first worshipping God through them, at length worshipped them along with God. The systems of paganism thence arising bore the impress of the temperament and circumstances of the nations who framed them; and thus each exhibits a spirit, creed, and mythology, in most respects peculiar to itself. Of these systems we would now speak.

The human mind has naturally a consciousness of a power superior to itself at work in the universe, and, when not blinded by passion or deluded by habit, it regards that power as existing in one conscious being the former, though not the Creator of the world. (We say not the Creator, because the making of the material universe out of nothing has never been entertained by mankind when un

aided by revelation from on high.) Accordingly, all systems of paganism, however differing in spirit and form, agreed in this-that, far exalted above all the deities popularly worshipped, and whose imaginary history constituted the national mythology, there existed a supreme ruler, who in many attributes fulfilled our ideas of God. Among the ancient Persians, this spirit was styled "Time without bounds"-in India, "the Great Soul"-in China, "the Supreme Ruler "-among the Greeks and Romans, "the Greatest and Best." But, from the common people, this great being was quite hidden by the more attractive deities of their mythology. It was only by the most enlightened of each nation that his existence was acknowledged; and even by them he is always spoken of with great vagueness, and seems rather a metaphysical abstraction of the mind than a real object, endowed with self-consciousness or possessed of moral perfections. From overrating the importance of expressions concerning this shadowy head, very erroneous opinions have at times been formed as to the morality of certain heathen religions; but the only sure foundation of opinion, in such matters, is to be found in the popular creeds.

In early times, when external nature deeply impressed men's minds, and when the laws that regulate its phenomena were still mysteries, the universal form of idolatry was the Sabian. Men, when they cry to the Deity, look to the sky. In its fathomless depths of azure, in its purity, and in the

brilliant phenomena it displays, they behold a fit abode for the great God who is above the worlds: in its wild meteors, they see his warnings; in the thunderings and lightnings, his wrath; in the dazzling sky-beams, his smile. And when the pristine race of men beheld the glorious sun, holding these realms as his own-entering them with a blaze of light, and quitting them amid the splendours of royalty divine-they deemed him lord of the sky -lord of the sky and god of the human race; for they beheld him, moreover, clothing earth with the hues of the rainbow, warming the soil, and eliciting from its bosom fruits and flowers, and all vegetation; cheering men and animals with his beams, and lighting them to their pursuits and enjoyments. With him, all was life and beauty; without him, all was darkness and death. Each day, from east to west, he travelled over the broad earth, viewing the world and its inhabitants; and his bright orb, upon which no mortal can look undazzled, seemed the eye of God watching over creation. When he withdrew from the heavens, and made night to refresh his creatures, he left the moon and the sentinel stars to keep watch over the slumbers of earth; and these, also, were adored by the earlier generations of mankind, as subordinate objects of worship.

By his necessities and by his passions, man is so absorbed in the material interests of existence, that there is a constant danger of his spiritual powers being neglected, and his abstract ideas forgotten.

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Even in his most enlightened state, this is true; but it is especially so in regard to the comparatively rude intellects of paganism. Religion must then speak to its votaries in rites and ceremonies. These considerations occasioned the permanence and diffusion of the practice of idol-worship; but it is not probable that they originated it. In early times, men acted less from reflection than from instinct; and the love of symbols is natural in man. sides the use of symbols in early writing and languages, to which mankind had recourse from necessity, there is an instinctive impulse in our nature to obtain representatives of what we admire, and to bestow upon these much of the love or veneration that we feel for the things represented. It is an instinct catholic in human nature, developed in all times and in all places—in the heart of civilisation, as in the midst of barbarism-in the countless busts and portraits of Europe, as in the rudely-carved idols of African fetishism.

Accordingly, when the sun and planets, at first adored as emblems of the Creator, at length became invested by their worshippers with a portion of divinity, idolatry soon followed, still further to lure men from the truth. Soon after the dispersion of Babel, typical of man's wandering from the great Fountain of Light, traces of this moral blindness are discoverable. The most ancient temple in the world was that of Belus at Babylon, surmounted by a gigantic golden statue of the sun-god, which, placed high above the people, flashed in the upper

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