Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/38

 the fire: and the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith. Deliver me; for thou art my god.

Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the Lord, for the glory of His majesty when He ariseth to shake terribly the earth. In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver and gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and the bats.

Again events glide on. Persia runs the usual course. Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse— fatal sequence repeated so often, yet to so little purpose. The hardy warrior of the mountains degenerated into a vulgar sybarite. His manliness became effeminacy; his piety a ritual of priests; himself a liar, a coward, and a slave. The Greeks conquered the Persians, copied their manners, and fell in turn before the Romans. We count little more than 500 years from the fall of Babylon, and the entire known world was lying at the feet of a great military despotism. Coming originally themselves from the East, the classic nations had brought with them also the primæval nature-worship of Asia. The Greek imagination had woven the Eastern metaphors into a singular mythology, in which the gods were represented as beings possessing in a splendid degree physical beauty, physical strength, with the kind of awfulness which belonged to their origin; the fitful, wanton, changeable, yet also terrible powers of the elemental world. Translated into the language of humanity, the actions and adventures thus ascribed