All such parables are enforced upon Christians, with the addition of dogmas which, in their extraordinary character, leave far behind them the wildest conceptions of heathenism. The Christians, in order to believe in a Deity, have found it necessary to kill their God, that they themselves should live! And now, the Supreme, unknown one, the Father of grace and mercy, and his celestial hierarchy are managed by the Church as though they were so many theatrical stars and supernumeraries under salary! Six centuries before the Christian era, Xenophones had disposed of such anthropomorphism by an immortal satire, recorded and preserved by Clement of Alexandria: “There is one God Supreme ... Whose form is not like unto man’s, and as unlike his nature; But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members; So if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man’s fashion, And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, Each kind the Divine with its own form and nature endowing.”[490] And hear Vyasa--the poet-pantheist of India, who, for all the scientists can prove, may have lived, as Jacolliot has it, some fifteen thousand years ago--discoursing on Maya, the illusion of the senses: “All religious dogmas only serve to obscure the intelligence of man.... Worship of divinities, under the allegories of which is hidden respect for natural laws, drives away truth to the profit of the basest superstitions” (_Vyasa Maya_).