e story forced on mankind's
intelligence, that the Supreme Power could or would for any wise
purpose be transformed into a dove, and re-enact the mythical part of
Jupiter with a Christian Leda, the Jew carpenter's wife, Mary, under
the disguise of a bird. Such a story and the theory on which it rests
Shelley summarised as follows:

"According to this book, God created Satan, who, instigated
by the impulses of his nature, contended with the Omnipotent
for the throne of Heaven. After a contest for the empire, in
which God was victorious, Satan was thrust into a pit of
burning sulphur. On man's creation, God placed within his
reach a tree whose fruit he forbade him to taste, on pain of
death; permitting Satan, at the same time, to employ all his
artifice to persuade this innocent and wondering creature to
transgress the fatal prohibition.

"The first man yielded to this temptation; and to satisfy
Divine Justice the whole of his posterity must have been
eternally burned in hell, if God had not sent his only Son
on earth, to save those few whose salvation had been
foreseen and determined before the creation of the world."

The hero of this fabulous episode, beneath which a great truth lies
hidden, the Christian Ahrimanes or Typhon, the Devil, as painted by
Milton, he considered a moral being, far superior to the God depicted
by the same author, and who, under the form of the second person of
the Christian Trinity, Shelley tells us of coming humbly,

"Veiling his horrible God-head in the shape
Of man, scorn'd by the world, his name unheard,
Save by the rabble of his native town,
Even as a parish demagogue. He led
The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace,
In semblance; but he lit within their souls
The quenchless flame of zeal, and blest the sword
He brought on earth to satiate with the blood
Of truth and freedom his malignant soul."

Elsewhere, in extension of the same, he puts the accompanying words in
the mouth of God the Father, to illustrate the doctrine of Christian
Atonement:

"I will beget a son, and he shall bear
The sins of all the world; he shall arise
In an unnoticed corner of the earth,
And he shall die upon a cross, and purge
The universal crime; so that the few
On whom my grace descends, those who are marked
As vessels to the honor of their God,
May cre