Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/100

Rh Greece, and India, like some of the legends of the Old Testament, served to confound moral distinctions, and encourage crime. Polytheists themselves confess it. Yet a distinction seems often to have been made between the private and the official character of the deities. There was no devil, no pandemonium, in ancient classic Polytheism as in the modern Church. Antiquity has no such disgrace to bear. Perhaps the poetic fictions about the Gods were regarded always as fictions, and no more. Still this influence must have been pernicious. It would seem, at first glance, that only strong intellectual insight, or great moral purity, or a happy combination of external circumstances, could free men from the evil. However, in forming the morals of a people, it is not so much the doctrine that penetrates and moves the nation's soul as it is the feeling of that sublimity which resides only in God, and of that enchanting loveliness which alone belongs to what is filled with God. Isocrates well called the mythological tales blasphemies against the Gods. Aristophanes exposes in public the absurdities which were honoured in the recesses of the temples. The priesthood in Greece has no armour of offence against ridicule. But goodness never dies out of man's heart.

Mankind pass slowly from stage to stage:—

seems the gradual progress of the race. But in the midst of the absurd doctrines of the priests, and the immoral tales wherewith mistaken poets sought to adorn their conception of God, pure hearts beat, and lofty minds rose