the well-considered
words of Professor Naville, in the first of his lectures on modern
atheism.[129] He says: "Almost all 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 (Cleanthus) who wrote these words: 'Nothing is accomplished on the
earth without Thee, O God, save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in
their folly.' It was in a theatre at Athens, that the chorus of a
tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ago: 'May destiny aid me to
preserve, unsullied, the purity of my words, and of all my actions,
according to those sublime laws which, brought forth in the celestial
heights, have the raven alone for their father, to which the race of
mortals did not give birth and which oblivion shall never entomb. In
them is a supreme God, and one who waxes not old.' It would be easy to
multiply quotations of this order and to show, in the documents of
Grecian and Roman civilization, numerous traces of the knowledge of the
only and holy God."

With much careful discrimination, Dr. William A.P. Martin, of the
Peking University, has said: "It is customary with a certain school to
represent religion as altogether the fruit of an intellectual process.
It had its birth, say they, in ignorance, is modified by every stage in
the progress of knowledge, and expires when the light of philosophy
reaches its noon-day. The fetish gives place to a personification of the
powers of nature, and this poetic pantheon is, in time, superseded by
the high idea of unity in nature expressed by monotheism. This theory
has the merit of verisimilitude. It indicates what might be the process
if man were left to make his own religion; but it has the misfortune to
be at variance with facts. A wide survey of the history of civilized
nations (and the history of others is beyond reach) shows that the
actual process undergone by the human mind in its religious development
is precisely opposite to that which this theory supposes; in a word,
that man was not left to construct his own creed, but that his
blundering logic has always been active in its attempts to corrupt and
obscure a divine original. The connection subsisting between the
religious systems of ancient and distant countries presents many a
problem difficult of solution. Indeed, their mythologies and religious
rites are generally so distinct as to admit the hypo