welve labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun,
of which Hercules is an old name, through the twelve
signs. Chronos, or time, being measured by the apparent
motion of the heavens, is figured as their child;
Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring,
yet is again itself in the high faith of a human soul,
conscious of its power and its endurance, supposed to
be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or life; and so on
through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and
Egypt. They are no more than real insight into real
phenomena, allegorized as time went on, elaborated by
fancy, or idealized by imagination, but never losing
their original character.

Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive,
self-developing, and, as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant;
a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon as a new
scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society;
and the various nations found no difficulty in interchanging
their divinities--a new god either representing
a new power not hitherto discovered, or one with which
they were already familiar under a new name. With
such a power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had
been nothing more in it than this, such a system might
have gone on accommodating itself to the change of
times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of
nature was more clearly observed, and the identity of
it throughout the known world, the separate powers
were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
king; and, as the poets had originally personified the
elemental forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier
process, and discovering the law under the person.
Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do
for themselves they could not do for the multitude.
Phoebus and Aphrodite had been made too human to
be allegorized. Humanized, and yet, we may say,
only half-humanized, retaining their purely physical
nature, and without any proper moral attribute at
all, these gods and goddesses remained, to the many,
examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was
impossible to worship any more these idealized
despisers of it. The human caprices and passions
which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly
revenged themselves. Paganism became a lie, and
perished.

In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other
nations, but the Jews chiefly and principally) had been
movin