Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/365

Rh same in the Phoenician stories with that in Moses; from this the Grecians had their Chaos, and Ovid the beginning of his Metamorphosis. That all things were made by God was held by Plato and others; that darkness was before light, by Thales; that the stars were made by God, by Aratus; that life was infused into things by the breath of God, Virgil; that man was made, of dust, Hesiod and Homer; that the first life of man was in simplicity and nakedness, the Egyptians taught; and from thence the poets had their Golden Age. That in the first times men's lives lasted a thousand years, Berosus and others; that something divine was seen amongst men till that the greatness of our sins gave them cause to remove, Catullus; and this he that writes the story of Columbus reports from the Indians, of a great deluge, almost all. But to the main they hold one God; and though multiplicity hath been laid to their charge, yet certainly the clearer spirits understood these petty gods as things, not as deities: second causes, and several virtues of the great power: by Neptune, water; Juno, air; by Dispater, earth; by Vulcan, fire; and sometimes one god signified many things, as Jupiter the whole world, the whole heaven; and sometimes many gods one thing, as Ceres, Juno Magna, the earth. They concluded those to be vices which we do; nor was there much difference in their virtues, only Christians have made ready belief the highest, which they would hardly allow to be any. They held rewards for the good, and punishments for the ill; had their Elysium and their hell; and that they thought the pains eternal there, is evident in that they believed from thence was no return. They proportioned sufferings hereafter to offences here; as in Tantalus, Sisyphus, and others, among which that of conscience (the worm that never dies) was one, as in the vulture's gnawing of Prometheus' heart, and Virgil's ugliest of Furies thundering in Pirithous' ear, was not obscurely shown; and, yet nearer us, they held the number of the elect to be but small, and that there should be a last day, in which the world should perish by fire. Lastly, they had their priests, temples, altars.

We have seen now the parallel; let us inquire whether those things they seem to have in common with us, we have not in a more excellent manner, and whether the rest, in which we differ from all the world, we take not up with reason. To begin, then, with their Jupiter (for all before were but little stealths from Moses' works)—how much more like a deity are the actions our stories declare our God to have done, than what the ethnick authors deliver of theirs? How excellently elevated