"Ah! wretched they that worship vanities,
And consecrate dumb idols in their heart--
Who their own Maker, God on high, despise,
And fear the works of their own hands and art!
What fury, what great madness doth beguile
Men's minds that man should ugly shapes adore
Of birds, or bulls, or dragons, or the vile
Half-dog, half-man, on knees for aid implore."

One of their own poets jests them thus:

"Even now I was the stock of an old fig tree,
The workman doubting what I then should be,
A bench or god, at last a god made me."

The Romans, for a time, were without images for any religious use, but
afterwards they received into their city the idols of all the nations
they conquered; and as they became the lords of the whole earth, they
became slaves to the idols of all the world. Seneca says: "The images of
the gods they worship, those they pray unto with bended knees, _those_
they admire and adore, and contemn the artificers who made them."

The character and condition of their gods was worse than their own. The
common opinion touching their god of gods, _Jupiter_, was that he was
entombed in Crete, and his monument was there to be seen. Lactantius
_wittily_ says: "Tell me, I beseech you, how can the same god be alive
in one place and dead in another; have a temple dedicated to him in one
place and a tomb erected in another?" Callimachus, in his hymn on
_Jupiter_, calls the Cretians liars in this very respect. He says:

"The Cretians always lyars are, who raised unto thy name
A sepulchre, that never dyest, but ever art the same."

Lactantius informs us in book 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine
honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto _goddesses_, to _Venus_,
or _Faula_, to _Lapa_, the nurse of _Romulus_, so called among the
shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched
herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her
heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly
celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called _Floralia_.
They claimed that their great goddess, _Juno_, was both the wife and
sister of Jupiter; and Jupiter, and the other gods, they held, were no
better that adulterers, sodomites, murderers and thieves. Such was not
held in private but published to the world. They were described by their
painters in their tables, by their poets in their verses, and acted by
their players upon their sta