LETTER IV. LETTER IV. CAUSES OF THE IDEA OF A CREATION HAVING BEEN ABSENT MY DEAR BOY, Ir may surprise you at the first glance to find, that the ancient world were generally unable to cherish in their minds, that idea of a creating God which the Hebrew scriptures inculcate, and which the enlightened population of our own happier day so universally entertain; especially as the communication of the fact accompanied the first existence of our race. The hostility of some among us to this great verity of Nature, evinces that it may be opposed by individuals without being unknown or forgotten: but that in every country of antiquity it should have been so much abandoned and disliked, and so many wild and unwarranted conjectures adopted instead, is a circumstance which it is difficult to explain. The real cause I believe to be, that all great truths require a certain progression of the human mind, both morally and intellectually, in order to be adequately valued, felt or understood. The true idea of God is too much connected with the true philosophy of Nature, with the right feelings of the human heart, and with the proper ethical dispositions of the character, to be either liked or fostered where IV. these are absent. But these are notoriously de- LETTER ficient wherever Paganism prevails; and without unjustly defaming other ages and nations, we may say, that the strange puerilities which they preferred to worship; the fantastic baby dreams which they patronised and sang, with the lavish effusions of their admiring genius; and the positive falsehoods which on divine subjects they either ignorantly adopted or designedly taught, imply that the human intellect had not then reached that extended correctness of judgment, which these require, nor attained that proportion of knowlege, without which, this invaluable faculty of our spirit will not on any subject be efficaciously exerted.1 ' Plutarch's representations of the ideas of some of the most celebrated men of antiquity upon the Deity, show us his impressions of what these were; Christians may misconceive them, but he, with a more congenial education, must have sufficiently understood them. 'Some of the philosophers, as Diagoras the Milesian, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Euhemeros of Tegea, said that there were no gods at all. 'Anaxagoras declared that material things existed stationary from the beginning; but that the mind of God put them in order, and made generations of them all. 'Plato thought that material things were subsisting, but without any arrangement, and were moving confusedly about, and that the Deity, knowing that order was better than disorder, put them into regularity. 'Anaximander affirmed the stars to be the eternal Gods; Democritus, that Deity was a fiery form, the soul of the world. 'Pythagoras taught, that of the principles of things the Monad was God, and good, which was the nature of One and the understanding itself; but the Duad was indefinite, and a dæmon and evil, about which is the multitude of matter and the visible world.' All these systems gave co-eternity or anterior eternity to Matter. 'Aristotle supposed that the Supreme God (avwrarw Oɛov) was a separate form stationed on the sphere of the universe, with an ethereal body, which he called the Fifth. This being divided according to the spheres, cohering to them by its nature, but distinct in reason, he thought that each of the spheres was a living being, consisting of body and soul; of which the body is ethereal, always moving circu larly: LETTER IV. For it is universally true that Nature must be properly known as to its constitution, laws and substances, before it can be felt to have been essentially and originally an intelligent creation: and until this is sufficiently perceived from direct revelation reverentially believed, or from a distinct knowlege of the composition, science and adaptations which it contains, an intelligent Creator making and adjusting both its matter and its form, will not be attached to it, nor can be convincingly inferred from it. He is always what He is; but we cannot discern Him, till our minds have been duly trained to trace Him in His works; just as no one can know astronomy or geography without a similar process. It is as impossible for a Bramin or Buddhist, with their vernacular books of their sciences, to be a rational geographer, as with their Vedas, Puranas and Ramayunas and accredited idolatry, to have a rational idea of God. A palace cannot be built of mud, nor can the Toorkmun or Caffre architects of their cabins construct a cathedral. Both the mind and the material must be improved, before the efficiency can occur; and for this result to take larly but the soul is immoveable, and, by its energy, the cause of motion. The Stoics thought the Deity to be more common in every thing; a workman fire (πνρ тεXVIкоv) proceeding in a way to the generation of the world, comprehending all things with spermatic reasons, by which all things are made according to fated destiny; a spirit pervading the whole universe, but changing its denominations as it passes thro all nature. So that God is the world, the stars, and the earth, and the mind supreme above all in the sky. 'Epicurus declared, that all the Gods have human forms (avdowTOELEC); but all these can be seen by the reason only, from the subtlety of the nature of their images. They were also incorruptible, atomical, empty, unbounded and alike.' Plut. Plac. Phil. l. i. c. 7. IV. place, sufficient time and the suited progress must LETTER intermediately precede.2 It is the perceived and understood skill of any human mechanism which occasions us to estimate justly the contriving talents of its maker. As long as a savage believes that a watch grows of itself, he will never suppose that there has been a watch-maker: nor would those, who thought a ship to be a living animal, imagine that any naval architect constructed it. So, as long as the classical nations would dream of marriages between the dif 3 ? I am quite satisfied, and I write with the largest recollection of all that I have read upon the subject which I can command, that no individual in any country, from the time of Thales to our Saviour, except in the Jewish nation, either believed, or would have admitted, both the first article in our Decalogue and the first sentence in our Creed, with which the poorest person who attends his Sunday devotion is now familiar: "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods but me. "I believe in God; the Father Almighty; the Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.' The creation of matter, and the non-existence of any other gods of any sex, than the One Almighty whom we worship, were nowhere parts of the ancient mind out of Judea, Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, the stoic school, and even Cicero, believed in the existence of secondary and inferior divinities, in addition to the Supreme whom they spoke of. All paid worship to some of them, and all taught and practised conformity to the popular superstitions of their country. Nor do I think that any but the Persians were hostile to the representation of their Deities by material images of some form or other. Most writers who mention these, applaud and justify the practice. The second commandment was therefore as much beyond them as the first. Plato disliked Homer's pictures of the intrigues and vices of his gods, but expressly admits the existence of such beings, tho with a different costume. Plotinus, Porphyry and Julian took similar distinctions, and upheld Paganism stoutly with their own modifications. Nothing but Christianity would have overthrown it, nor will now do so in any country where it is prevailing. 6 * Captain Beechy mentions, that the natives of Bear Island, in the Pacific, supposed the first vessel which they saw to be the spirit of one of their relations lately deceased.' Voyage, vol. i. p. 244. LETTER ferent parts of Nature, and literally thought and IV. believed all things to be parental productions; and would consider night, and the sky, the ocean, rivers, fire and the other elements to be personal beings forming connubial unions with each other, and having men and gods as their children, or at least constantly talking of them as such, it was impossible, that with such opinions they could think of a designing and forming Creator. It was more suitable to these ideas that they should have fancied that men crawled out of the earth like worms, or were selfhatched from floating eggs; and when they added to these systems, or rather superseded them, by their Olympian Divinities, they only enlarged their own distance from the truth. It was, indeed, an argument of some good sense on this subject that they did not suppose the world to be the creation of their favourite gods. This was as certain, as it is, that it has been framed by the real Deity. They did unconsciously the due justice to Him, in not ascribing it to these idols and worshipped names, who had no actual existence but in their popular ceremonies, in their state religions, in their grotesque or beautiful statues, in their individual chit-chat, and in their ever-pleasing poetry. 6 • We must not mistake the disapproval of some of the tales attached to these gods, as indicating a disbelief in the Polytheism. Pindar complains of fables being repeated about them (Olym. I. v. 43), but he was one of their zealous votaries, and revered them as such. Aristotle, who seems to have preferred the notion that mankind have had no beginning, in one of the works ascribed to him, remarks,— 'If men and animals have sprung from the earth, that must have been in one of two ways: either they crawled out as worms, or came out of eggs.' De Gen. An. 1. iii. cap. ult. 6 We see the impression of the human mind as it rose to greater improvements in its knowlege and thought, in the sarcastic observations of Pliny, on the kind of beings which the world—the intellectual Grecians' |