Note 1585 — THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.
Reading edition
Archbishop Whately, Bacon's Essays, p. 145, quotes this stanza, and says that it is strange that Pope, and those who use similar language, should have "failed to perceive that the pagan nations were in reality atheists. For by the word God we understand an Eternal Being, who made and who governs all things. And so far were the ancient pagans from believing that 'in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,' that, on the contrary, the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and many other natural objects, were among the very gods they adored. Accordingly, the apostle Paul expressly calls the ancient pagans, atheists, Ephes. ii. 12, though he well knew that they worshipped certain supposed superior beings which they called gods. But he says in the Epistle to the Romans that 'they worshipped the creature more than, that is, instead of the Creator.' And at Lystra, when the people were going to do sacrifice to him and Barnabas, mistaking them for two of their gods, he told them to 'turn from those vanities to serve the living God, who made heaven and earth.'" The pagans were equally ignorant of the holiness of the Supreme Being; and Pope himself, describing the heathen divinities, Essay on Man, Epist. iii. 257, calls them
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.
Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."