Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859
Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859
Book Excerpt
kind of
spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled
with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine
Sower,--that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were
genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to
be stigmatized or harshly characterized,--that without them the human
soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth. This
may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of
the old Greek ethnic faith. Its deities were nothing better than the
passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and
incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,--not
conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying
perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with permission
to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are granted to
us by steam and telegraph-wires.
The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and confessors. It w
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