Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/89

 any such deification of mortals known to be human beings—any such hero-worship as classical schoolmen and antiquaries suppose, ever did take place among any portion of the human race; for it is contrary to the natural tendency and movement of the human mind. It is a trite observation, that no people have ever been discovered by the traveller in so rude and barbarous a state as to be without any sentiment of a Divinity; and that this universal sentiment is more distinctive of the species man even than his reasoning powers,—for in these the elephant, the dog, the beaver, the bee, partake, and almost vie with human beings in the lowest condition of humanity. The writers who make the most of this trite observation in support of natural religion overlook a powerful argument for the truth of revealed religion, in a sentiment equally innate, and as widely diffused among men in a natural state. No people have ever been discovered by the traveller or the antiquary without a strong and distinct impression of the incarnation, past, present, or to come, as well as the existence, of the Divinity. Our divines turn away from this argument in support of revealed religion. They assume that, in the dark ages of every nation, individuals have taken to themselves the attributes and honours of divinity—have imposed themselves upon their contemporaries as gods, or have been taken by their contemporaries or their posterity for gods; and in this schoolboy way great divines, historians, and philosophers think of, tell of, and account for, idolatry and paganism among rude uncivilised nations. But they do not apply to the subject two universally and permanently ruling principles of the human mind in every stage of development: first, that there is no deceiving a man's own consciousness; and, second, that if a man cannot deceive himself, he cannot deceive others. Alexander the Great, or Odin, or the Roman em-