in far later times, represented man as created by Jupiter.

Now let us turn to Christianity; pursuing it through the functions
which it exercises in common with Paganism, and also through those
which it exercises separately and incommunicably.

I. As to the _Idea of God_,--how great was the chasm dividing
the Hebrew God from all gods of idolatrous birth, and with what
starry grandeur this revelation of _Supreme_ deity must have
wheeled upwards into the field of human contemplation, when first
surmounting the steams of earth-born heathenism, I need not impress
upon any Christian audience. To their _knowledge_ little
could be added. Yet to _know_ is not always to _feel:_ and
without a correspondent depth of feeling, there is in moral
cases no effectual knowledge. Not the understanding is sufficient
upon such ground, but that which the Scriptures in their profound
philosophy entitle the 'understanding heart.' And perhaps few readers
will have adequately appreciated the prodigious change effected in
the theatre of the human spirit, by the transition, sudden as the
explosion of light, in the Hebrew cosmogony, when, from the caprice
of a fleshly god, in one hour man mounted to a justice that knew
no shadow of change; from cruelty, mounted to a love which was
inexhaustible; from gleams of _essential_ evil, to a holiness
that could not be fathomed; from a power and a knowledge, under
limitations so merely and obviously human,[Footnote: It is a natural
thought, to any person who has not explored these recesses of human
degradation, that surely the Pagans must have had it in their power
to invest their gods with all conceivable perfections, quite as
much as we that are _not_ Pagans. The thing wanting to the
Pagans, he will think, was the _right_: otherwise as regarded