Soft voices from the solemn streams,"

by whose shores, veiled in eternal twilight, wandered her sad child,
the queen of the realm of Dis, with its nine-fold river, gates of
adamant, and minarets of fire. The heartlessness of all the ethnic
deities, of whatever age or nation, is a noticeable feature, especially
when contrasted with the unfathomable pity of their Exterminator, who
wept over the chief city of his fatherland, and would have gathered it,
as a hen gathereth her chickens, under the wings of his love, though
its sons were seeking to compass his destruction. Those old ethnic
deities were cruel, inexorable, and relentless. They knew nothing of
mercy and forgiveness. They ministered no balm to human sorrow. The
daemons who wandered in human shape over the classic lands of old were
all fickle and malevolent. They oftentimes impelled their victims to
suicide. The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the
regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants
and modern representatives. The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant
are their successors in malignity. The fair humanities of the old
religion were fair only in shape and exterior. The old pagan gods were
friendly only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for
the poor and lowly. Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no
alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld,
--rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers,
in the "Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and
drudge of some poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for a privileged
few.

It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion
"growing wild,"--that the human soil was prepared by such kind of
spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled