Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/39

 to the gods became in process of time impossible to be believed. Intellect expanded; moral sense grew more vigorous, and with it the conviction that if the national traditions were true man must be more just than his Maker. In Æschylus and Sophocles, in Pindar and Plato, you see conscience asserting its sovereignty over the most sacred beliefs—instinctive reverence and piety struggling sometimes to express themselves under the names and forms of the past, sometimes bursting out uncontrollably into indignant abhorrence:

'All religions,' says Gibbon, 'are to the vulgar equally true, to the philosopher equally false, and to