and I shall then conclude with considering how far atheism, or at least an absence of natural piety, may in many cases be only the rebound of an ill-balanced mind from the asperities and the rigidities of some local orthodoxy. If there is rebellion anywhere in a State, the Government is seldom altogether free from blame.

CHAPTER IV.

POLYTHEISM.

"Fragilis et laboriosa mortalitas in partes ista digessit, infirmitatis suæ memor, ut portionibus coleret quisque quo maxime indigeret."-PLINY.

POLYTHEISM is not atheism certainly on the

very face of the word; many gods can never mean no god; and therefore the intelligent reader may justly ask what is it doing here? The answer is simply this, that we have to do in this discourse not merely with abstract beliefs, but with practical consequences which flow from them; not with the abstract denial of a God, but with the concrete existence of such fancies, notions, or dogmas about God, as practically result in a denial of a divine order and beauty and harmony in that reasoned unity of things which we call the world. When in a well-known passage of his Epistle to the Ephesians (ii. 12) St. Paul talks of the members of the Christian Church in that part of the East as having lived

formerly the slaves of all sorts of base lusts and passions without God-a0eo-and without hope in the world—though the word "feos is no doubt frequently used by classical writers to signify a man holding dogmatically what we call atheistical opinions there is no reason to suppose that he had any such shallow dogmatists specially in view; but a man with him is an atheist, even though perhaps paying worship to some gods, or demons-like the Ceylonese-who as a matter of moral fact shows by all his conduct that he believes in no established order of a great social brotherhood of men born of a common father, but recognises only his personal will, and special passion as the legitimate motive power of human conduct. Or, to take a simile from political life, that man is a traitor and a rebel not only who pastes a public proclamation up in the marketplace that the king has no right to reign, but much more rather the man who refuses to pay the taxes, disdains the accepted tokens of homage, and draws his sword for the head of his own clan, and in the cause of his own kinship only, not for the head of the State. So, if the celebrated Macdonald of the Isles lost his haughty position in the Hebridean seas, was fined of his lordship, and swept all his clan with himself into ruin as the natural issue of his

reiterated attempts to shake off the legitimate authority of the monarch to whom he had sworn fealty, in the same way it may be in the religious world, that if any people prostrate themselves before gods which are no gods, and whose intervention hinders the true God from being seen and recognised, they may be guilty of a conduct which is practically as bad, or even worse, than absolute atheism. For religious atheism—that is, atheistical doctrine— means only an absence of all positive theological contents, and may be quite consistent, as in the case of Buddha to be presently considered, with a strict observance of the great moral laws that bind society together, and even with a belief in the necessary moral consequences of actions, entailed from generation to generation-as, indeed, the Buddhists believe of all men most firmly; but the misdirected reverence and utterly unreasonable religiosity of some forms of superstition, may in its effect on social life amount to what the mathematicians call a minus quantity, that is, something worse than nothing; as certain kinds of food, though not immediately poisonous, may by the presence of some element unfavourable to a healthy vitality, lead by sure degrees to the disruption of the system. This consideration it was which led Plutarch and other

wise ancients to discuss the question whether atheism or superstition is the more pernicious?—a question which manifestly admits of no clear answer; for, while on the one hand there may be an intellectual atheism associated with so much practical goodness as to make it socially innocuous, there may on the other hand be a moral atheism ramping so wildly through all the organism of society, and disturbing the machinery of human life to such a degree as to render many kinds of degrading superstition less dangerous. Our inquiry, therefore, into the origin and character of polytheism, as connected with atheism, will tend to bring into view two important aspects of that misdirected reverence, too often confounded: first, that aspect of polytheism in which the good so predominates as to make it in a social point of view emphatically preferable to all forms of atheism; and secondly, that more degraded aspect which presents itself when neither poetical grace, nor gracious moral influences, nor an underlying consciousness of dimly-shadowed monotheism, contributes anything to redeem the absurdity, or mitigate the baseness of a reverence fathered by fear, and a worship inspired by selfishness. And in setting forth the most obvious propositions belonging to this interesting theme, if we confine ourselves