Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/145

Ch. 4. God are the characters and marks of himself, engraven on their minds by his own finger, when we see that in the same country, under one and the same name, men have far different, nay, often contrary and inconsistent ideas and conceptions of him? Their agreeing in a name, or sound, will scarce prove an innate notion of him.

§ 15. What true or tolerable notion of a Deity could they have, who acknowledged and worshipped hundreds? Every deity that they owned above one was an infallible evidence of their ignorance of him, and a proof that they had no true notion of God, where unity, infinity, and eternity were excluded. To which if we add their gross conceptions of corporeity, expressed in their images and representations of their deities; the amours, marriages, copulations, lusts, quarrels, and other mean qualities attributed by them to their gods; we shall have little reason to think, that the heathen world, i. e. the greatest part of mankind, had such ideas of God in their minds, as he himself, out of care that they should not be mistaken about him, was author of. And this universality of consent, so much argued, if it prove any native impressions, it will be only this, that God imprinted on the minds of all men, speaking the same language, a name for himself, but not any idea; since those people, who agreed in the name, had at the same time far different apprehensions about the thing signified. If they say, that the variety of deities worshipped by the heathen world were but figurative ways of expressing the several attributes of that incomprehensible being, or several parts of his providence; I answer, what they might be in the original I will not here inquire; but that they were so in the thoughts of the vulgar, I think nobody will affirm. And he that will consult the voyage of the bishop of, c. 13. (not to mention other testimonies) will find that the theology of the Siamites professedly owns a plurality of gods: or, as the abbé more