Page:A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations.djvu/20

Rh Every nation had its respective gods, over which one more excellent than the rest presided; yet in such a manner that the supreme Deity was himself controlled by the rigid decrees of fate, or by what the philosophers called eternal necessity. The gods of the east were different from those of the Gauls, the Germans, and other northern natinms. The Grecian divinities differed from those of the Egyptians, who deified plants, and a great variety of the productions both of nature and art. Each people had also their peculiar manner of worshipping and appeasing their respective deities. In process of time, however, the Greeks and Romans grew as ambitious in their religious pretensions as in their political claims. They maintained that their gods, though under different appellations, were the objects of religious worship in all nations; and therefore they gave the names of their deities to those of other countries.

The deities of almost all nations were either ancient heroes, renowned for noble exploits and worthy deeds, or kings and generals who had founded empires, or women who had become illustrious by remarkable actions or useful inventions. The merit of those eminent persons, contemplated by their posterity with enthusiastic gratitude, was the cause of their exaltation to celestial honours. The natural world furnished another kind of deities; and as the sun, moon, and stars shine with a lustre superiour to that of all other material beings, they received religious homage from almost all the nations of the world. The learned Mr. Bryant, in his analysis of ancient mythology, supposes that the worship of the powers of nature, principally the sun, was the original idolatry, which prevailed in all nations; that the characters of the pagan deities of different countries melt into each other; and that the whole crowd of gods and goddesses mean only the powers of nature, (especially the sun) branched out and diversified by a number of different names and attributes. Sir William Jones, in his history of the antiquities of Asia, appears to have embraced the same opinion. See Bryant, vol i. p. 2,308. See also Sir William Jones’ Dissertation of the gods of Greece, Italy, and India.