IOTA OF
GRANDEUR._

It is not for so idle a purpose as that of showing the Pagan
backsliding--that is too evident--but for a far subtler purpose, and one
which no man has touched, viz., the incapacity of creating grandeur for
the Pagans, even with _carte blanche_ in their favour, that I write this
paper. Nothing is more incomprehensible than the following fact--nothing
than this when mastered and understood is more thoroughly
instructive--the fact that having a wide, a limitless field open before
them, free to give and to take away at their own pleasure, the Pagans
could not invest their Gods with any iota of grandeur. Diana, when you
translate her into the Moon, then indeed partakes in all the _natural_
grandeur of a planet associated with a dreamy light, with forests,
forest lawns, etc., or the wild accidents of a huntress. But the Moon
and the Huntress are surely not the creations of Pagans, nor indebted to
them for anything but the murderous depluming which Pagan mythology has
operated upon all that is in earth or in the waters that are under the
earth. Now, why could not the ancients raise one little scintillating
glory in behalf of their monstrous deities? So far are they from thus
raising Jupiter, that he is sometimes made the ground of nature (not,
observe, for any positive reason that they had for any relation that
Jupiter had to Creation, but simply for the negative reason that they
had nobody else)--never does Jupiter seem more disgusting than when as
just now in a translation of the 'Batrachia' I read that Jupiter had
given to frogs an amphibious nature, making the awful, ancient,
first-born secrets of Chaos to be his, and thus forcing into contrast
and remembrance his odious personality.

Why, why, why could not the Romans, etc., make a grandeur for their
Gods? Not being able to make them grand, they daubed them with finery.
All that people imagine in the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias--_they_
themselves confer. But an apostle is beyond their reach.

When, be it well observed, the cruel and dark religions are far more
successful than those of Greece and Rome, for Osiris, etc., by the might
of the devil, of darkness, are truly terrific. Cybele stands as a middle
term half-way between these dark forms and the Greek or Roman. Pluto is
the very model of a puny attempt at darkness utterly failing. He looks
big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his face; he has a
masterful dog, nothing half so fearful