Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/91

 carnation of the Supreme Being at some period, past, present, or future; that it is not Jupiter, Mars, or Odin who were men or heroes set up by their fellowmen as gods to be worshipped, but that it is the innate and universal sentiment of the human mind which has set them up. What the mind cannot grasp in one conception, or express in one expression, it necessarily divides; and thus groups of divine attributes have been impersonated as distinct deities, individualised, named, incarnated, by an irresistible instinct to find an incarnation of Divine Power; and these distinct individualisations produced in a rude state of the human mind by the poverty of language, have been made historical personages of. But, looking at the natural movement of the human mind it may be reasonably doubted whether any historical personage, who really lived as a mortal man, was ever made a god of by his fellow-men. The Christian philosopher, who considers the expected Messiah of the Jews, the incarnation of Jupiter, of Odin, and the living incarnation of a Lama among a great proportion of the present population of Asia, will not hesitate to place the accomplished advent of our Saviour upon the same innate sentiment of the human mind as the existence itself of Supreme Divine Power. Both are universal innate sentiments of the mind of man. The divines and Christian philosophers who are not content with resting the existence of a Supreme Divine Power upon the innate sentiment of the human mind, upon the same ground as the proof of our self-existence rests, but who seek to prove the existence of a Supreme Divine Power from the design, contrivance, and wisdom manifested in the material objects around us,—Paley, and the Bridgewater Bequest writers, who undertook, for a prize of two or three hundred pounds given by an English lord, to prove to all and sundry of God's creatures the existence of a God from the