een in those pantheistic religions
which lie behind all the mythologies of the ancient world, like a
nebulous vapor out of which the more distinct idols and images of
paganism are struggling. Here the notion of the Divine unity is still
preserved; but the Divine personality and holiness are lost. God becomes
a vague impersonal Power, with no moral qualities, and no religious
attributes; and it is difficult to say which is worst in its moral
influence, this pantheism which while retaining the doctrine of the
Divine unity yet denudes the Deity of all that renders him an object of
either love or reverence, or the grosser idolatries that succeeded it.
For man cannot love, with all his mind and heart and soul and strength, a
vast impersonal force working blindly through infinite space and
everlasting time.

And the second and last stage in this process of vitiating the true idea
of God appears in that polytheism in the midst of which St. Paul lived,
and labored, and preached, and died; in that seductive and beautiful
paganism, that classical idolatry, which still addresses the human taste
in such a fascinating manner, in the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo
Belvidere. The idea of the unity of God is now mangled and cut up into
the "gods many" and the "lords many," into the thirty thousand divinities
of the pagan pantheon. This completes the process. God now gives his
guilty creature over to these vain imaginations of naturalism,
materialism, and idolatry, and to an increasingly darkening mind, until
in the lowest forms of heathenism he so distorts and suppresses the
concreated idea of the Deity that some speculatists assert that it does
not belong to his constitution, and that his Maker never endowed him with
it. How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed!

But it will be objected that all this lies in the past. This is the
account of a process that has required centuries, yea millenniums, to
bring about. A hundred generations have been engaged in transmuting
the monotheism with which the human race started, into the pantheism and
polytheism in which the great majority of it is now involved. How do
you establish the guilt of those at the end of the line? How can you
charge upon the present generation of pagans the same culpability that
Paul imputed to their ancestors eighteen centuries ago, and that Noah the
preacher of righteousness denounced, upon the antediluvian pagan? As the
deteriorating process adva