the inhabitants of Meroe. He says, "You may find everywhere throughout the whole world one uniform law and opinion, that there is one GOD, the King and Father of all; and many gods, the sons of God, who reign on earth."

Nothing appears more certain than that the gods of the Greeks, usually styled demons, were the spirits of the dead. Says GROTE, "The demons first introduced into the religious atmosphere of the Grecian world by the author of weeks and days [Hesiod] are always deserving of attention as the seed of a doctrine which afterwards underwent many changes and became of great importance; first as the constituent element of the Pagan faith, then as one of the helps of its subversion. . . The objectionable ceremonies of the Pagan world were defended upon the ground that in no other way could the exigencies of such malignant beings be appeased. They were most frequently noticed as causes of evil, and thus the name [dæmon) came insensibly to convey with it a bad sense; the idea of an evil being as contrasted with the goodness of a god. So it was found by Christian writers when they commenced their controversy with Paganism ; one branch of their argument led them to identify the Pagan gods with demons in the evil sense, and the insensible change in the received meaning of the word lent them assistance. For they could easily show that not only in Homer, but in the gene

ral language of early Pagans, all the gods were spoken of as demons.”*

Says Dr. Hebbe: "Eternal existence was not a quality admitted to belong to the gods of Greece ; nor were they represented as the first and original gods. According to the earliest views of the Greeks, the gods often wandered among them, shared in their business, requited them with good or ill, in conformity to their reception."

"Noah was the original Zeus and Dios of the Greeks. He was a planter of the vine, and inventor of fermented liquors-hence Zeuth fermentrendered Zeus by the Greeks. Bacchus was Chus, the grandson of Noah. Ammon was Ham."†

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Hesiod taught that 'The spirits of departed mortals become demons when separated from their earthly bodies;' and PLUTARCH, that The demons of the Greeks were the ghosts and genii of departed men.' All Pagan antiquity affirms,' says Dr. CAMPBELL, 'that from Titan and Saturn, the poetic progeny of Cœlus and Terra, down to Esculapius, Proteus, and Minos, all their divinities were the ghosts of dead men; and were so regarded by the most erudite of the Pagans themselves."

HESIOD thus beautifully expresses their views:

The gods who dwell on high Olympus' hill,
First framed a golden race of men, who lived
Under old Saturn's calm, auspicious sway;

*Grote's Hist. of Greece, vol. 1, c. 2.

† See Ency. Brit., Art, Polytheism; also Cyclo, Philadelphia ed., Art, Demon.

Like gods they lived, their hearts devoid of care,
Beyond the reach of pain and piercing woes,
The infirmities of age, nor felt nor feared,

Their nerves with youthful vigor strong, their days
In jocund mirth they past remote from ills.
Now when this godlike race were lodg'd on earth,

By Jove's high will to demigods they rose,

And airy demons who benign on earth

Converse, the guides and guardians of mankind.

In darkness veiled they range earth's utmost bound.
This reward from beauteous Jove awaits illustrious deeds."

VIRGIL represents Magnus Apollo as bending from the sky to address the youth Julius: "Go on, spotless boy, in the paths of virtue, it is the way to the stars; offspring of the gods thyself, so shalt thou become the father of gods."

When Paul preached Jesus and the Resurrection, at Athens, he was accused of setting forth strange daimonia, demons. To this he replied : "Athenians! I perceive that you are-deisidaimonesterous—exceedingly devoted to the worship of demons. For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription : TO AN UNKNOWN GOD." But how did this prove them exceedingly devoted to the worship of demons? Plainly, all their gods were demons, and they worshiped not only all they knew, but one whom they knew not. Says Paul, "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, not to God.†

*Acts 17: 18.

†1 Cor. 10: 20.

JOSEPHUS represents the daughters of the Midianites, when in obedience to the advice and direction of Balaam, they were endeavoring to seduce the Israelites to the worship of their gods, as using the following language: "You should worship the proper gods of the country, especially while our gods are common to all men, and yours such as belong to nobody else but yourselves." What those proper gods of the country were who were common to all men," may be learned from the Bible. The Israelites were seduced by the wiles of the Midianites to the worship of their divinities, in consequence of which twenty-four thousand of the Israelites died of the plague. It is said of the daughters of Moab—

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"They called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor: and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand."-Num. xxv: 2, 9.

The psalmist says, "they joined themselves unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead."+

The foregoing is sufficient to establish the fact that the gods of the heathen nations, which the Midianites declared were 66 common to all men," were no others than dead men deified.

It is a mistake to suppose that the heathen worshiped wood and stone solely in their images. The †Ps. 106: 28.

*Josephus b. iv, c. vi.

images were considered only as representatives of their deities, which were supposed to dwell in or about them.

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Says Dr. Hebbe: "The form given to the deities of the East was only considered as a means to represent them to the senses. 'It was,' says Mr. Heeren, never any more, and this is the reason why no hesitation was made among the Eastern nations to depart from the human form, and to disfigure it wherever it seemed possible to give, by that means, a greater degree of distinctness to the symbolic representation, or if any other object, could thus be successfully accomplished.”—Ancient Greece, p. 55.

Says Mr. Beecher: "The Jews before Christ, and the Fathers after, believed that evil departed spirits lurked in images, spoke in oracles, controlled omens, and in various ways encouraged men to worship them.*

Taylor in his translation of Jamblichus, p. 39, when speaking of the sacred animals of the Egyptians, inserts the following note from Plutarch's treatise of Isis and Osiris :

"Hence the divinity is not worse represented in these animals than in the workmanships of copper and stone, which in a similar manner suffer corruption and decay, but are naturally deprived of all sense and consciousness. This then I consider as

* Essay, p. 49.