I admit that very different modes of representing the case have been in vogue. Sometimes by those to whom the interest of Christianity is precious, and sometimes in indifference or hostility to its fortunes, it is held that the basis of the Greek mythology is laid in the deification of the powers of nature. The common assumptions have been such as the following: That the starting-point of the religion of the heroic age is to be sought only in the facts of the world, in the ideas and experience of man. That nature-worship, the deification of elemental and other physical powers, was the original and proper basis of the system. That this system, presumably self-consistent, as having been founded on a given principle, was broken up by the intervention of theogonic revolutions. That the system, of which Jupiter was at the head, was an imperfect reconstruction of a scheme of divine rule out of the fragments of an earlier religion, and that it supplanted the elder gods. In short, the Greek mythology is represented as a corrupt edition, not of original revealed religion, but of a Nature-worship which, as it seems to be assumed, was separated by a gulf never measured, and never passed, from the primitive religious traditions of our race. Further it seems to be held, that the faults and imperfections of the pagan religion have their root only in a radical inability of the human mind to produce pure deity; that they do not represent the depravation of an ancient and divine gift, but rather the simple failure of man in a work of invention. Indeed, we need not wonder that it should fail in a process which, critically considered, can mean little else than mere exaggeration of itself and from its own experience[6], and which must be so apt to become positive caricature. [6] See Nägelsbach, Homerische Theologie, i. 1. ii. 1. Also (if I understand it rightly), Döllinger’s Heidenthum und Judenthum, ii. 1. §. 1. p. 54. ~_The basis was not in Nature-worship._~ Again, Dean Prideaux, in his Connection of Sacred and Profane History, gives the following genesis of the Greek mythology. From the beginning, he says, there was a general notion among men, founded on a sense that they were impure, of the necessity of a mediator with God. There being no mediator clearly revealed, man chose mediators for himself, and took the sun, moon, and stars, as high intelligences well fitted for the purpose. Hence we find Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Diana, to be first ranked in the polytheism of the ancients: for they were their first gods[7]. [7] Prideaux, i. 3. vol. i. p. 198. This theory is not in correspondence with the facts of the heroic age. There is no sense whatever of an impurity disabling men from access to God; no clear or general opinion of the necessity of mediation; no glimpse even of a god superior to Jupiter and the rest with whom they were on behalf of man to mediate.