apparent to them, after the race had willingly forgotten the original
instructions from their Creator.

The dreadful consequences of this "lack of knowledge," as appearing in the
religion and morals of the nations, and through these affecting their
welfare, equalled and even surpassed all that might by theory have been
presaged from the cause.

This ignorance could not annihilate the _principle_ of religion in the
spirit of man; but in taking away the awful repression of the idea of one
exclusive sovereign Divinity, it left that spirit to fabricate its
religion in its own manner. And as the creating of gods might be the most
appropriate way of celebrating the deliverance from the most imposing idea
of one Supreme Being, depraved and insane invention took this direction
with ardor. [Footnote: Those who have read Goethe's Memoirs of Himself,
may recollect the part where that late idolized "patriarch" of German
literature tells of the lively interest he had at one time felt in shaping
out of his imagination and philosophy a theology, beginning with the
fabrication of a god (or gods,) and amplified into a system of principles,
existences, and relations.] The mind threw a fictitious divinity into its
own phantasms, and into the objects in the visible world. It is amazing to
observe how, when one solemn principle was taken away, the promiscuous
numberless crowd of almost all shapes of fancy and of matter became, as it
were, instinct with ambition, and mounted into gods. They were alternately
the toys and the tyrants of their miserable creator. They appalled him
often, and often he could make sport with them. For overawing him by their
supposed power, they made him a compensation by descending to a fellowship
with his follies and vices. But indeed this was a condition of their
creation; they _must_ own their mortal progenitor by sharing his
depravity, even amidst the lordly domination assigned to them over him and