housand different
beings. Not only are the heavenly bodies adored and the powers of
nature, but men, animals, and inanimate objects. The feeling of the
holiness of God is not less wanting, it would seem, than the idea of His
unity. Religion serves as a pretext for the unchaining of human
passions. This is the case unfortunately with religion in general, and
the true religion is no exception to the rule: but what characterizes
paganism is that in its case religion, by its own proper nature, favors
the development of immorality. Celebrated shrines become the dens of a
prostitution which forms part of the homage rendered to the gods; the
religious rites of ancient Asia, and those of Greece which fell under
their influence, are notorious for their lewdness. The temples of false
deities, too often defiled by debauchery, are too often also dishonored
by frightful sacrifices. The ancient civilization of Mexico was elegant
and even refined in some respects; but the altars were stained, every
year, with the blood of thousands of human beings; and the votaries of
this sanguinary worship devoured, in solemn banquets, the quivering
limbs of the victims. Let us not look for examples too far removed from
the civilization which has produced our own. In the Greek and Roman
world, the stories of the gods were not very edifying, as every one
knows: the worship of Bacchus gave no encouragement to temperance, and
the festivals of Venus were not a school of chastity. It would be easy,
by bringing together facts of this sort, to form a picture full of
sombre coloring, and to conclude that our idea of God, the idea of the
only and holy God, does not proceed from the impure sources of idolatry.
The proceeding would be brief and convenient; but such an estimation of
the facts, false because incomplete, would destroy the value of the
conclusion. In pagan antiquity, in fact, the abominations of which I
have just reminded you did not by themselves make up religious
tradition. Side by side with a current of darkness and impurity, we meet
with a current of pure ideas and of strong gleams of the day.

Almost all the pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the Divine unity
over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the Divine
holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi. It was a Greek who wrote
these words: "Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God,
save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in