sight had seemed most so. When a man pauses for the purpose of attentively reviewing the Pantheon of Greece and Rome, what strikes him at the first with most depth of impression and with most horror is, the _wickedness_ of this Pantheon. And he observes with surprise, that this wickedness, which is at a furnace-heat in the superior gods, becomes fainter and paler as you descend. Amongst the semi-deities, such as the Oreads or Dryads, the Nereids or Naiads, he feels not at all offended. The odor of corruption, the _saeva mephitis_, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the _dii majorum gentium_, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes over him at the thought that demons, reflecting the worst aspects of brutal races, ever _could_ have levied worship from his own. It is true they do so no longer as regards _our_ planet. But what _has_ been apparently _may_ be. God made the Greeks and Romans of one blood with himself; he cannot deny that _intellectually_ the Greeks--he cannot deny that _morally_ the Romans--were amongst the foremost of human races; and he trembles in thinking that abominations, whose smoke ascended through so many ages to the _supreme_ heavens, may, or might, so far as human resistance is concerned, again become the law for the noblest of his species. A deep feeling, it is true, exists latently in human beings of something perishable in evil. Whatsoever is founded in wickedness, according to a deep misgiving dispersed amongst men, must be tainted with corruption. _There_ might seem consolation; but a man who reflects is not quite so sure of _that_. As a commonplace resounding in schools, it may be justly current amongst us, that what is evil by nature or by origin must be transient. But _that_ may be because evil in all human things is partial, is heterogeneous; evil mixed with good; and the two natures, by their mutual enmity, must enter into a collision, which may possibly guarantee the final destruction of the whole compound. Such a result may not threaten a nature that is purely and totally evil, that is _homogeneously_ evil. Dark natures there may be, whose _essence_ is evil, that may have an abiding root in the system of the universe not less awfully exempt from change than the mysterious foundations of God.