ust suffice for the present. The truth is this: such
men, as a general rule, neither understand the Bible in its teachings and
character, nor the ancient mythical system. In it Jupiter, among the
Romans, and throughout every language, appears before us as the "Father of
Gods and men"--"the God of gods," the "Master of the gods." Voltaire says:
It is false that Cicero, or any other Roman, ever said that it did not
become the majesty of the empire to acknowledge a Supreme God. Their
Jupiter, the Zeus of the Greeks and the Jehovah of the Phonecians, was
always considered as the master of the secondary gods. He adds: But is not
Jupiter, the master of all the gods, a word belonging to every nation,
from the Euphrates to the Tiber? Among the first Romans it was _Jov_,
_Jovis_; among the Greeks, _Zeus_; among the Phonecians and Syrians and
Egyptians, _Jehovah_. The last term is the Hebrew scriptural name of
God--denoting _permanent being_--in perfect keeping with the Bible title or
descriptive appellation, "I AM THAT I AM."

The ancient worshipers of the gods had lost all but the name, _power_ and
relation, which they ever knew of Jehovah. And they could do no more than
clothe Jupiter with their own imperfections and impurities--and then place
him above all the gods; it was necessary for them to view him as excelling
in all the characteristics of the secondary gods. And having attributed to
the gods all they knew of human passions and corruptions, they clothed
Jupiter himself with more villainy and corruption than belonged to any
other god. In this was the great blasphemous sacrilege of ancient
idolatry. They thus demonstrated their own apostacy; and the fact that
their system of gods was a counterfeit, a mythical system. They were
destitute of any standard of right and wrong, having no conceptions of the
divine character which were not drawn from their own imperfect and corrupt
lives. The divine character, as revealed in the revelation of Christ, and
presented to us as God manifest in the flesh, is at once the very opposite
of the characters given in the myths. The distance between the two is the
distance between the lowest degradation of God-like power exercised in the
lowest passions, and the sublimity of Heaven's own spotless life. I love
the religion of the Scriptures, because it restores to the race the lost
knowledge of God and the additional life of Jesus--the only perfect model
known in the history of the race. It is th