ld naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty
agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of
reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,
they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal
beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as
knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism
appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of
the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve
labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an
old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured
by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,
the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in
the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its
endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and
so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are
no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went
on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing
their original character.

Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,
as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon
as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the
various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a
new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one
with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a
power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in
it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to
the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more
clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,
the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,
the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law
under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for
themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite
had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanis