the universe. We may safely affirm, that the mighty artificer of
deifications, the corrupt soul of man, never once, in its almost infinite
diversification of device in their production, struck out a form of
absolute goodness. No, if there were ten thousand deities, there should
not be one that should be authorized by perfect rectitude in itself to
punish _him_; not one by which it should be possible for him to be rebuked
without having a right to recriminate.

Such a pernicious creation of active delusions it was that took the place
of religion in the absence of knowledge. And to this intellectual
obscuration, and this legion of pestilent fallacies, swarming like the
locusts from the smoke of the bottomless pit in the vision of St. John,
the fatal effect on morals and happiness corresponded. Indeed the mischief
done there, perhaps even exceeded the proportion of the ignorance and the
false theology; conformably to the rule, that anything wrong in the mind
will be the _most_ wrong where it comes the nearest to its ultimate
practical effect--except when in this operation outward it is met and
checked by some foreign counteraction.

The people of those nations (and the same description is applicable to
modern heathens) did not know the essential nature of perfect goodness, or
virtue. How should they know it? A depraved mind would not find in itself
any native conception to give the bright form of it. There were no living
examples of it. The men who held the pre-eminence in the community were
generally, in the most important points, its reverse. It was for the
_Divine_ nature to have presented, in a manifestation of itself, the
archetype of perfect rectitude, whence might have been derived the
modified exemplar for human virtue. And so _would_ the idea of perfect
moral excellence have come to dwell and shine in the understanding, if it
had been the True Divinity that men beheld in their contemplations of a