Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/28



By the side of all this there was a no less elaborate religion—an ecclesiastical hierarchy—^powerful as the sacerdotalism of Mediæval Europe, with a creed in the middle of it which was a complicated idolatry of the physical forces.

There are at bottom but two possible religions—that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe. The sun at all times has been the central object of this material reverence. The sun was the parent of light; the sun was the lord of the sky and the lord of the seasons; at the sun^s bidding the earth brought forth her harvests and ripened them to maturity. The sun, too, was beneficent to the good and to the evil, and, like the laws of political economy, drew no harsh distinctions between one person and another. It demanded only that certain work should be done, and smiled equally on the crops of the slave-driver and the garden of the innocent peasant. The moon, when the sun sunk to his night's rest, reigned as his