oo filthy for preachers to meddle with. Is it a
filthy pool? Then let us bring all the purifying elements of the nation
to bear upon it and see if there is anything in it besides corruption.
If there is not, the sooner we find it out the better, and if there is,
the sooner we get it separated from its corruption the better.

THE RELIGION AND SOCIETY OF GREECE.

HOW DOES IT COMPARE WITH OURS.

From the Egyptians and other nations to whom the Grecians were indebted
for their earliest laws, they derived their established religion. To the
worship of the twelve principal divinities the gratitude of the
succeeding ages added the deification of heroes and legislators renowned
for their important services to society. Various degrees of adoration
were paid to the gods and to the souls of departed heroes. Temples were
erected, festivals were instituted, games were celebrated, and
sacrifices were offered with more or less pomp and magnificence to them
all. A regular gradation of immortal beings was acknowledged to preside
throughout universal nature from the Naiad, who was adored as the
tutelary guardian of a stream to Jupiter, the father of gods and men,
who ruled with Supreme power over heaven and earth.

The religion of the people extended little beyond the external honors
paid to the gods of their country and the attendance upon sacrifices and
processions. The sacred ceremonies were magnificent and public, except
that the votaries of Bacchus and Ceres were indulged in their secret
mysteries. The festivals were observed with every circumstance of pomp
and splendor to charm the eye and please the imagination. A sacrifice
was a feast attended with gayety and even licentiousness. Every temple
was the resort of the idle and the dissolute, and the shrines of the
Cyprian Venus and the Athenian Minerva could attest that devotion, far
from being a pure and exalted exercise of the mind, was only the
introduction to dissoluteness and debauchery.

The northern regions of Greece were particularly renowned for temples
from which oracles were issued. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, situated
upon a lofty rock near Parnassus, and that of Jupiter in the groves of
Dodona, were celebrated for the responses of the Pythia and the priests;
they were held in the greatest veneration for many ages, and their
oracles were consulted even in the most enlightened times by
philosophers themselves, who, in this instance, as well as many others,