by such a set of doctrines. That men should have worshipped their poor
fellow-man as a God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all
manner of animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves
such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the
Universe: all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is
a clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of
misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by,
and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and
silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in
the heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are
in man; in all men; in us too.

Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion:
mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did
believe it,--merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of
the name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest
against this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and
I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to
Paganism, and to all other _isms_ by which man has ever for a length of
time striven to walk in this world. They have all had a truth in them,
or men would not have taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in
religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions,
they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating
influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things,
but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let
us never forget this. It seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that
of quackery giving birth to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives
birth to nothing; gives death to all things. We shall not see into the
true heart of anything, if we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we
do not reject the quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions,
with which our and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to
sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere
is the born enemy of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind
of truth in it. Read the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr.
Turner's _Account of his Embassy_ to that country, and see. They have
their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down
always an Incarnation of Himself into every genera