With the universal consent of mankind, if we except only the hardy and ignorant rejection of a few sceptics, who, in every age, have erected the standard of infidelity, the doctrine of a presiding and governing Providence has been proclaimed and admitted. Wherever man has been found, there also the altar and the sacrifice have attested the ardour of his faith. Supplication and prayer have alike issued from the lips of the savage and the civilized. It seems as if man were formed to be no less a religious than a social being; and it will not be too much to consider the world as a mighty and august temple, in which, with all the diversity of tongues and knowledge, the sovereignty of heaven was to be acknowledged and adored. In proportion as this tendency is powerful and universal, it should be regulated, corrected, and informed; and we proceed to inquire how far it has been so disciplined and instructed by the sages of the world? It will not be denied that the poets and teachers of Greece have sometimes discussed the subject with great piety and wisdom, and happily directed the hopes and fears of men to a sovereign ruler of the universe. By some, a divine government was deduced from the order and motion of the heavenly bodies, which so clearly manifest interposition and design; and by others, from the occurrences of life, which, so often defeating the counsels of the wise, and the designs of the mighty, may emphatically attest the interposition of superior power*. To im * Et male consultis pretium est, prudentia fallax, Scilicet est aliud quod nos cogatque, regatque Majus, et in proprias ducit mortalia leges. Manilius, lib, iv press this awful tenet upon the mind, a wise and just appeal was made to the heart of men. Repose your weakness on the gods," says Juvenal, " for they love man better than he loves himself*." “Innumerable deities surround us," says Hesiod, "to watch over the movements of thought, and the motives of conductt." "When we act justly," says Homer, "heaven prolongs our days, but punishment is awarded to the wicked." 66 Every man," says Lucan," depends on the will of the gods, and the most secret deeds are open to their inspection ||." "To Jupiter," says Eschylus, "we owe an undivided heart; darkness with him is light; from the heights of heaven he beholds the impious; he wills and is obeyed §." In this manner the doctrine of Juvenal, the censor and moralist of his age, exhibits, in his tenth Satyr, the genius which embellishes wisdom, and the wisdom which ennobles genius; and there is not a passage, perhaps, in any poet, which approaches nearer to the doctrine of the Gospel, than that which, in this Satyr, refers to the justice and beneficence of the divine administration. Si consilium vis Permittis ipsis expendere numinibus, quid Nam pro jocundis optissima quæque dabunt Dî. It would be almost thought that the Pagan satyrist had been admitted for a moment to the Christian fountain. + Die and Oper. v. 250. Odyss. lib. xiii. v. 214. Heremus cuncti superis, temploque tacente Numen eget. Pharsal. § Eschyl. Suppl. Act 1. See also Euripid. Orest. Act 1. Iphigen. In Taur. Act 2. Eschyl. Eumenid. Act 1. Sophocl. Edip. Act 1. All the works of the Greek and Roman poets abound with authorities of this nature. a Providence was occasionally announced and applied. The worldly mind might have been admonished, the pious mind enlightened and cheered; and all might have learned to contemplate the celestial superintendence which was so taught, with the mingled sentiments of salutary awe, and sustaining hope. But, unhappily, here, also, just persuasions were enfeebled in their influence by very different tenets. I. Almost in the same page in which a divine administration was unequivocally and emphatically affirmed, the powers of chance, or fortune, of necessity or of fate, were announced and deified, as the invincible and the eternal directors of the human world. The hymns of the lyrist celebrated the highsounding praises of these shadowy beings; and even the epic and tragic Muse descended from their lofty strains to countenance by their authority the same obscure or impious jargon. To the wise agency of Providence was thus opposed the domination of blind but counteracting powers. The fable of poetry became a rule of faith. The people were left to fluctuate between a paramount destiny which controuled the gods, and presiding gods which controuled mankind. Nothing stable remained, on which religious trust might repose; and, while the learned were to wander from doubt to doubt, and from supposition to supposition; the ignorant were to be involved in the mischiefs of this pernicious uncertainty, and to float amid the billows of life, unsettled in their conviction of that power which lifted the wave, or controuled the storm. Think, says Agrippa to the Roman people, of that irresistible necessity, to which the gods themselves must submit *;-you deceive yourselves, says Prometheus to the chorus in the tragedy, fate is superior to wisdom, and Jupiter himself is governed by itt;-Fortune, says Seneca, rules without order the affairs of men, and blindly scatters her gifts over the world. This language was of popular usage, and addressed to, and admitted by, the popular faith. But, under the impression of such tenets, who was to distinguish the point where necessity ceased to operate, and where the rule of a just and beneficent Providence commenced? Who was to be adequately restrained by his reverence of the majesty or consoled and fortified by his confidence in the goodness, of gods, thus described as inferior to a blind and unintelligible fate, and thus admitted to be controuled in their administration of the world? The whole doctrine was compounded of the most jarring elements; and human belief, equally indeterminate and vague, was left to fluctuate between an omnipotent fatality without wisdom, and controuling gods without omnipotence ||. II. When the poet or the philosopher speaks with more reverence of the divine administration, the gods are exhibited in a manner scarcely less calculated to avert the piety and the faith of the votary. What guilty and grovelling passions are beheld in *Dionys. Halicarn. lib. v. Res humanæ ordine nullo Eschyl. Prometh. Fortuna regit, spargitque manu Numera cæca, pejora favens. Senec. Hypol. Act 3. Yet Seneca was a Stoic, who admitted the innumerable deities of his master Zeno, and could sometimes speak in sublime terms of the superintendence of Providence. Appendix, Note K. action, and what vile and execrable deeds are perpetrated, when the deities appear on earth, and mingle in the affairs of men! How are the wise and the virtuous overthrown, and the unworthy favoured and aggrandized, for the more ready accomplishment of some celestial prejudice, or the more perfect indulgence of some celestial depravity! No less than three deities are occupied in accelerating the ruin of an unoffending woman*. The "ox-eyed venerable Juno," irritated by the illicit loves of her august spouse, visits with unappeasable vengeance the heroic and blameless Hercules. The laughter-loving Venus repays the judgment of Paris by the persecution of the Greeks; and the decision of the apple prepares the way for the misery and massacre of a ten years' war. From these pictures of folly or of barbarity, what were the people to learn of the nature and motive of celestial interposition? And with what trust were they to recognise the providence of beings whom they were virtually instructed to detest or despise, and whose cruelty and caprice, scarcely redeemed by a single virtue, could scarcely awaken any emotion but terror and dismay? III. Nor was the Greek or Roman votary to discover any thing more likely to purify his conceptions of the providence of his gods, when he adverted to the views disclosed by the poets, of the general temper of the synods of heaven. If he had been permitted to contemplate unity of design and benevolence of will in the discussions of the celestial assembly, he would have been proportionally instructed to trust, to reverence, and to hope. But • Æneid. lib. iv. With what inimitable grace has the poet veiled the impurity of the tale! |