of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose
smoke ascended through so many ages to the _supreme_ heavens,
may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again
become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it
is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable
in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep
misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption.
_There_ might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is
not quite so sure of _that_. As a commonplace resounding in
schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil
by nature or by origin must be transient. But _that_ may be
because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil
mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must
enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final
destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten
a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is _homogeneously_
evil. Dark natures there may be, whose _essence_ is evil, that
may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less
awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.

This is dreadful. Wickedness that is immeasurable, in connection
with power that is superhuman, appals the imagination. Yet this is
a combination that might easily have been conceived; and a wicked
god still commands a mode of reverence. But that feature of the
pagan pantheon, which I am contrasting with this, viz., that no
pagan deity is an _abstraction_ but a vile _concrete_, impresses
myself with a subtler sense of horror; because it blends the
hateful with a mode of the ludicrous. For the sake of explaining
myself to the non-philosophic reader, I beg him to consider what
is the sort of feeling with which he regards an ancient river-god,