According to Herodotus, the Egyptians invented twelve gods, which were imported into Greece. These were, doubtless, of the lowest order of merit, but of sufficient importance to justify the report that the worship of stone images originated in the East. Venus was first adored at Paphos under the form of an ærolite fallen from heaven. It was by such circumstances that a special sanctity was conferred upon particular localities. The artistic merit of the idols was vastly improved, but still the theology of the Greeks remained purely anthropomorphous, the human form being to them the paragon of excellence. But to his whole intellectual being this was a representative, the embodiment and very identity of divinity. All the susceptibilities of his immortal nature, full of the endless enthusiasms respecting every thing splendid, so that in the estimation of an apostle, he was "very religious," were exercised to refine this image and exalt it. Living, he did this, and dying, he looked beyond the grave but to a world of men, sublimated, indeed, but still with human passions, and capable of human enjoyments. He turned with fond desire toward the radiance of the descending sun, which with genial glories seemed wooing him to another and purer earth. The great ocean stream severed the world of debasing toil from the bright sphere of not less active but nobler pursuits, and on that western shore he anticipated fairer as well as more abundant fruits than the East might behold. The great national altar on the Acropolis was exterior to the temple, and fronted the setting sun. Egyptian worship was so closely allied to that of India, that when the sepoys in Sir Ralph Abercrombie's expedition entered the ancient temples in the valley of the Nile, they immediately asserted that their own divinities were discovered upon the walls, and worshiped them accordingly. But no such identity ever existed with the purer forms of the West. All the gods of Hellenic Greeks, from Jupiter down to Hercules, were the ancestors of the primitive Pelasgic tribes which existed in Asia Minor, Crete, and the islands of the Archipelago, but seldom in Greece itself. At its intellectual and moral centre, Egyptian fetichism had some influence on the one hand, and Indo-Germanic metaphysics a good deal on the other; still the chief element in Greek mythology was hero-worship, made as unexceptionable as it could be by a people whose religion mainly consisted in ancestral adoration. True, their whole system was a fable and an absurdity; but the puerilities which defaced its beauty were the remnant of a more barbarous state of things upon which they improved, and we may wonder most that they so for emancipated themselves.