nativity a Scotchman, says of the same:

"Ah! wretched they that worship vanities,
And consecrate dumb idols in their heart—
Who their own Maker, God on high, despise,
And fear the works of their own hands and art!
What fury, what great madness doth beguile
Men's minds that man should ugly shapes adore
Of birds, or bulls, or dragons, or the vile
Half-dog, half-man, on knees for aid implore."

One of their own poets jests them thus:

"Even now I was the stock of an old fig tree,
The workman doubting what I then should be,
A bench or god, at last a god made me."

The Romans, for a time, were without images for any religious use, but afterwards they received into their city the idols of all the nations they conquered; and as they became the lords of the whole earth, they became slaves to the idols of all the world. Seneca says: "The images of the gods they worship, those they pray unto with bended knees, those they admire and adore, and contemn the artificers who made them."

The character and condition of their gods was worse than their own. The common opinion touching their god of gods, Jupiter, was that he was entombed in Crete, and his monument was there to be seen. Lactantius wittily says: "Tell me, I beseech you, how can the same god be alive in one place and dead in another; have a temple dedicated to him in one place and a tomb erected in another?" Callimachus, in his hymn on Jupiter, calls the Cretians liars in this very respect. He says:

"The Cretians always lyars are, who raised unto thy name
A sepulchre, that never dyest, but ever art the same."

Lactantius informs us in book 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto goddesses, to Venus, or Faula, to Lapa, the nurse of Romulus, so called among the shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called Floralia. They claimed that their great goddess, Juno, was both the wife and sister of Jupiter; and Jupiter, and the other gods, they held, were no better that adulterers, sodomites, murderers and thieves. Such was not held in private but published to the world. They were described by their painters in their tables, by their poets in their verses, and acted by their players upon their stages. (Lactantius, b. 5, ch. 21.)

As respects the manner in which they worshiped their gods, Alexander, in his Dierum Genialium, b. 6, ch. 26, insists that the most odious thing in their history was the effusion of human blood in the service of their gods. This same author says, "This unnatural, barbarous practice spread itself well nigh over the known world; it was in use among the Trojans, as it seems from Virgil's lines touching Æneas:

"Their hands behind their backs he bound whom he had destined
A sacrifice unto the ghosts, and on whose flames to shed
Their blood he purposed."—Ænead.

Some ignorant infidels seem at a great loss to understand why the Lord should order the groves and altars of the heathen destroyed. (Again and again their groves were cut down.) The children of Israel were to make no offerings in the groves. If infidels will only exercise common sense inside of the history of the worship of Priapus and Berecynthia, they will cease fretting over the destruction of those beautiful forests. Those groves were the most corrupt places upon the earth, places of retirement from the altar into prostitution, carried on as a matter of worship pleasing to Priapus. Here, on account of becoming modesty, the half can not be told. The removal of nuisances in our own country is conducted upon the same principles upon which groves were destroyed by the Israelites.

Lycurgus dedicated an image to laughter, to be worshiped as a god, and this is said to be "the only law he ever made pertaining to religion." While his great object was to make warriors, he ordained some things noted for the education of youth. He ordained other laws so much in favor of lust and all carnality of the worst kind, that it might justly be said he made his entire commonwealth ludicrous. He instituted wrestlings, dances and other exercises of boys and girls naked, to be done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of young and old men. Adultery was also approved and permitted by the laws of Lycurgus. Plato and Aristotle advocated community of women, of goods and possessions, to the end that no man should have anything peculiar to himself, or know his own children. This was ordained by Plato, in order to establish in the commonwealth such a perfect unity that no man might be able to say, that is thine, or this is mine.

Aristotle, in the second book of his "Politiques," sets forth many other detestable things. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself.

Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how profitable it is for the commonwealth."

The morality of ancient times may be clearly seen in the fact that all manner of debasing things were brought to the front. How could men be persuaded that adultery should be punished when they were taught from infancy that it was a virtue among the gods? Lucian gives his experience thus, "When I was yet a boy, and heard out of Homer and Hesiod of the adulteries, fornications, rapes and seditions of the gods, truly I thought that those things were very excellent, and began even then to be greatly affected towards them, for I could not imagine that the gods themselves would ever have committed adultery if they had not esteemed the same lawful and good." To all this it may be added that the opinions of the ancient philosophers concerning virtue, vice, the final happiness, and the state of the spirit after death, were diverse and contradictory. The Epicurean doctrine was, that sovereign happiness consisted in pleasure. They granted a God, but denied his Providence; so virtue was without a spur, and vice without a bridle.

The Stoics also granted a Divine Providence, but they maintained such a fatal necessity that they blunted the edge of all virtuous efforts and excused themselves in vicious conduct. Both Stoics and Epicureans doubted the immortality of the human spirit, and thereby opened the way to all manner of licentiousness.

I am persuaded that eternity alone will fully reveal the consequences of a denial of a future life and retribution; it is a physical leprosy which removes all the most powerful incentives to virtue and loosens up the soul to all manner of lustful gratifications.

A man once remarked: "I have lived four years an avowed infidel. I have boasted that I would live a good man and die an infidel. I have formed the acquaintance of all the