Page:Who is God in China.djvu/138

 human passions good and bad, became the sole object of worship of the common people, instead of the One God.

That one idea, then, the original import of, once lost in gross idolatry, no longer implied "Heaven," as "the One God"; but it now chiefly meant "a god" only,—one of the many "gods" habitually supposed to inhabit Heaven. And, although, as Eusebius remarks (Præp. Ev. lib. iii. p.141, ed. Col.),, yet such a religion was not that of the many. But,, "while saying they ought to worship the celestial and the æthereal gods first; ;" then, in the second place, the good spirits; thirdly, the souls of great men; and, fourthly, to propitiate the evil spirits; yet , "they, in fact, mixed it up altogether," "serving, out of all those, the powers of evil alone, and giving themselves up wholly to worship them."

It would be wrong to affirm that they all wilfully did so. Yet it is true that even the greatest and the best of them were led passively, by "the vanity of