REFLECTIONS

ON THE

GROWTH OF HEATHENISM

AMONG

MODERN CHRISTIANS,

IN A

LETTER TO A FRIEND AT OXFORD.

HUMBLY RECOMMENDED TO THE SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF ALL THOSE WHO ARE ENTRUSTED WITH THE EDUCATION OF YOUTH.

BY A PRESBYTER OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

ADVERTISEMENT

TO THE EDITION PRINTED IN 1794.

THE Reader may be shocked when he is told, that there is a disposition to Heathenism in an age of so much improvement, and pronounce the accusation improbable and visionary; but he is requested to weigh impartially the facts here offered, and then to form his judgment. The following Letter was intended only for the inspection of a friend; but if there is any tendency in the public to such a peculiar kind of corruption, as is here pointed out, they ought to have some warning of it; and therefore it has been judged that the present publication can be neither impertinent nor unseasonable.

The present Edition of this Letter, in the year 1794, is more seasonable than the first; now we have been witness to the profane affectation of Heathen manners by the Philosophers of France; with its malignant effects on Religion, Government, and the Peace of the Christian world.

REFLECTIONS,

&c.

DEAR SIR,

A WORTHY gentleman *, who is a collector of things rare and curious in their several kinds, shewed me a large shoeing-horn, which as tradition reports had been the property of an ancient abbot of Glastonbury. This relic of antiquity is very handsomely engraved with figures representing the seven works of charity; which are, the giving of bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, lodging to strangers, visiting the sick, and prisoners, and burying the dead. On this my learned friend took occasion to remark, that in the ages before the Reformation, the subjects of the ornamental arts, which are now so universally taken from the Heathen Mythology, were then generally borrowed from the Holy Scripture, and had some pious relation to the doctrines of Christianity. Of this he shewed me another remarkable instance in the powder-horn of King Henry VIII. which is adorned with the history of St. Stephen's martyrdom, in elegant figures of ivory. Whereas, had an artist of this age been set to invent a device for a powder-horn, his imagination

The late Rev. Mr. Gestling, of Canterbury.

would immediately have suggested to him the fall of Phaeton, the Cyclops forging thunderbolts, or some like allusion to the history and effects of fire from the stores of the Heathen Mythology.

I shall not stop here to dispute which of these two sources, Paganism or Christianity, will furnish the best subjects for poets, painters, and sculptors to work upon but I cannot help observing, that the general state of religion and manners may be judged of by the style and taste adopted in the ornamental arts. There might be a faulty superstition, with a mixture of simplicity bordering upon ignorance, in the works of former ages; but the style of them shewed that Christianity was the religion of the country, and that the several particulars of the sacred history were then held in honour, as the subjects most worthy to be offered for admiration, and recommended by all the efforts of human ingenuity.

This was certainly the persuasion of those times; but in the present age the public taste can seldom find any thing but Heathen matter to work upon: from which it is natural to infer, that Heathenism is in better repute than formerly; and thence it will follow, that the public regard to Christianity, and all that relates to it, is proportionably declined.

Polydore Virgil, in his work De rerum inventoribus, tells us, how in the middle ages of the Church, they christened the ceremonies of the Pagan superstition, and adapted their fables to the mysteries of the Christian worship: which observation will undoubtedly account for much of the pomp that appears in the celebrities of the modern church of Rome. There might possibly be a very good intention in thus attempting to reclaim what had been misapplied, in order to make an impression upon vulgar minds in

their own way; but there was often great weakness and want of judgment in the manner, which should never be proposed for imitation. Thus much of their humour ought to be retained, that the true religion should, in all places, and on all occasions, be seen to preserve its superiority over the false; not merely because one is better than the other, but because the one is worthy of God, and will raise honourable sentiments in men, while the other was never intended for any thing but an engine of the devil, to infuse sentiments of impurity, obscenity, pride, and vanity, dishonourable to God, and destructive to man. Yet the taste for Heathen learning, which began to prevail about the times of the Reformation, hath been productive of an evil, which hath been growing upon us for two hundred years past, and hath at length given to Heathenism the upper hand in almost every subject. The fabulous objects of the Grecian mythology have even got possession of our churches; in one of which I have seen a monument, with elegant figures as large as the life, of the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, spinning and clipping the thread of a great man's life: by which species of memorial, he is taken as it were out of the hands of the true God, whom we Christians worship in our churches, and turned over to the miserable blindness of Heathen destiny: not to mention the insult and profanation with which Heathen idols are brought into a Christian temple. In the same church, the baptistery or font is removed almost out of sight; and when found, has a very mean and unworthy appearance, as if it were intended for some other use:

At the village of Wharton, near Kettering, in Northampton shire.