Note (return) — Chapter IV

Whilst the pagan polytheistic worship is, under one aspect, to be regarded as a departure from God, inasmuch as it takes away the honor due to God alone, and transfers it to the creature; still, under another aspect, we can not fail to recognize in it the effort of the human mind to fill up the chasm that seemed, to the undisciplined mind, to separate God and man--and to bridge the gulf between the visible and the invisible, the finite and the infinite. It was unquestionably an attempt to bring God nearer to the sense and comprehension of man. It had its origin in that instinctive yearning after the supernatural, the Divine, which dwells in all human hearts, and which has revealed itself in all philosophies, mysticisms, and religions. 150 This longing was stimulated by the contemplation of the living beauty and grandeur of the visible universe, which, to the lively fancy and deep feeling of the Greeks, seemed as the living vesture of the Infinite Mind,--the temple of the eternal Deity. In this visible universe the Divinity was partly revealed, and partly concealed. The unity of the all-pervading Intelligence was veiled beneath an apparent diversity of power, and a manifoldness of operations. They caught some glimpses of this universal presence in nature, but were more immediately and vividly impressed by the several manifestations of the divine perfections and divine operations, as so many separate rays of the Divinity, or so many subordinate agents and functionaries employed to execute the will and carry out the purposes of the Supreme Mind. 151 That unseen, incomprehensible Power and Presence was perceived in the sublimity of the deep blue sky, the energy of the vitalizing sun, the surging of the sea, the rushing wind, the roaring thunder, the ripening corn, and the clustering vine. To these separate manifestations of the Deity they gave personal names, as Jupiter to the heavens, Juno to the air, Neptune to the sea, Ceres to the corn, and Bacchus to the vine. These personals denoted, not the things themselves, but the invisible, divine powers supposed to preside over those several departments of nature. By a kind of prosopopœia "they spake of the things in nature, and parts of the world, as persons--and consequently as so many gods and goddesses--yet so as the intelligent might easily understand their meaning, that these were in reality nothing else but so many names and notions of that one Numen,--divine force and power which runs through all the world, multiformly displaying itself." 152 "Their various deities were but different names, different conceptions, of that Incomprehensible Being which no thought can reach, and no language express." 153 Having given to these several manifestations of the Divinity personal names, they now sought to represent them to the eye of sense by visible forms, as the symbols or images of the perfections of the unseen, the incomprehensible, the unknown God. And as the Greeks regarded man as the first and noblest among the phenomena of nature, they selected the human form as the highest sensible manifestation of God, the purest symbol of the Divinity. Grecian polytheism was thus a species of mythical anthropomorphism.