not tell him so. If a man gives us his gods, what more can he do?
And yet, it seems, he may be the richer for the loss. Never was
a question more senseless than that of the idolatrous fool,--"Ye
have taken away my gods, and what else have I left?" His godship was
a little injured in his transit; but he was very perfect in
deformity before, and his ugliness could not, by any accident, be
improved. I have put him into a glass case with some stuffed birds, at
which he ogles, with his great eyes, in a manner not altogether divine.
His condition, therefore, is pretty nearly that to which prophecy has
doomed all his tribe; if not cast to the "moles and the bats," it is
to the owls and parrots. I cannot help looking at him sometimes with
a sort of respect as contrasted with his worshippers; for though they
have been fools enough to worship him, he has, at least, not been fool
enough to worship them. Yet even they are better than the Pantheist,
who must regard it and every thing else, himself included, as a
fragment of divinity. I fear that, if I could regard either the Pantheist
or myself as divine, nothing in the world could keep me from blasphemy
every day and all day long.

"Again!" you will say, "my brother; is not that old vein of bitterness
yet exhausted?" But be it known to you that that last sarcasm was
especially for my own behoof. She is a sly jade,--conscience; like
many other folks, she has a trick of expressing her rebukes in
general language; as thus: "What a contemptible set of creatures the
race of men are!"--hoping that some folks will practically take it to
heart. Sometimes I do; and sometimes, I suppose, like my fellows, I look
very grave, and approvingly say, "It is but too true," with the air of
one who philosophically assents to a proposition in which he is totally
uninterested; whereupon conscience becomes outrageous and--personal.