~_Progressive deterioration._~ It is then in entire accordance with what has preceded, that, when the Pagan system has come into its old age, we should find it so wholly deprived of all the lineaments of original beauty, grandeur, and goodness, that we can read the destructive philosophy and poetry of the atheistic schools, and of Lucretius in particular, without the strong sentiment of horror, which in themselves they are fitted to excite. Milton, in the First Book of Paradise Lost, treats the Pagan gods as being, under new names, so many of the fallen angels, who with Satan had rebelled, and with him had been driven out from heaven, so that the world of heathen from the first had simply ‘devils to adore for deities.’ Whether this sentiment be poetically warrantable or not, (and for my own part I cannot but think it was one too much connected with a cold and lowered form of Christian doctrine,) it is not historically sound. We should distinguish broadly between this assertion, that the Pagan religion was an original falsehood, and the declaration of St. Paul, ‘I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God[16].’ To the same class as the words of the Apostle, belong, as I conceive, these (and other) sentences of Saint Augustine[17]; _non sunt dii, maligni sunt spiritus, quibus æterna tua felicitas pœna est.... Proinde si ad beatam pervenire desideras civitatem, devita dæmonum societatem_. For these terrible descriptions apply not to the infancy, but to the decrepitude of Paganism. The difference between them was as the difference between the babe in arms, and the hoary sinner on the threshold of death: and while the one representation summarily cuts man off from God, the other only shows to how fearful a distance he had by degrees travelled away. As time went on, and the _eidola_ of succeeding generations were heaped one upon another, the truly theistic element in the Pagan mythology was more and more hidden and overborne, until at length its association with evil was so inveterate and thorough, that the images, which the citizen or matron of the Roman empire had before the mind as those of gods, bore no appreciable resemblance to their divine original, but more and more amply corresponded with that dark side of our nature, on which we are accessible to, and finally may assume the likeness of, the evil one. [16] 1 Cor. x. 20. [17] De Civ. Dei, ii. 29. But the critical error that we seem to have committed may be thus described; we have thrown back upon the Homeric period the moral and mythological character of the system, such as we find it developed in later Greece and Rome: forgetful of the long and dim interval, that separates Homeric religion from almost every subsequent representation, and not duly appreciating the title of the poems to speak with an almost exclusive authority for their own insulated epoch. ~_Paganism in its decay._~