Nature is most perfect in her forms the higher she ascends; and man, standing at the apex of her wonders, is appointed to partake of the divine nature, through the homogeneous medium who bends from a celestial height for his relief; when so reached and renovated, the godlike part of the redeemed is molded to a whole of the purest, holiest, and, therefore, most enchanting harmony. The Greeks had their idealization of beneficence and atonement set forth in Hercules and Prometheus. The genealogy of the first was connected with Egypt and Persia. He was lineally descended from Perseus, whose mortal mother claimed connection with an Egyptian emigrant. He was the great epic subject of the poets before Homer, the model chief of those who fought at Thebes or Troy, and, at a later period, was the allegory of human effort ascending through rugged valor to the highest virtue. He was the ideal perfection of the ordinary life of the Greeks, as the higher exaggeration of heroes, invested with immortality, became gods. Every pagan nation has had such a mythical being, whose strength or weakness, victories or defeats, measurably describe the career of the sun through the seasons. A Scythian, an Etruscan, and a Lydian Hercules existed, whose legends all became tributary to those of the Greek hero. His name is supposed to mean _rover_ and _perambulator_ of earth, as well as _hyperion of the sky_, and he was the patronizing model of those famous navigators who spread his altars from coast to coast through the Mediterranean, to the extreme West, where _Arkaleus_ built the city of Gades (Cadiz), on which perpetual fire burned at his shrine. So deep and pervading were religious sentiments in that wonderful people at the best epoch, that not only in lowland towns, and on metropolitan eminences, were temples erected to the national deities, but also on lofty promontories; near the sea, beneficent zeal provided fanes exclusively for the casual worship of the passing mariner. The notion of a suffering deity, of one who, tortured, blinded, or imprisoned, might represent the earthly speculations of his worshipers, and, as a penitent, their religious emotions, was widely spread, from India westward, and by the Greeks was fixed forever in Prometheus, the ever dying and yet deathless Titan. Ancient sages taught that the discord of stormy elements would be dissolved and reduced to peace by the power of love, and the magic of beauty in the renovated soul would eventually curb its passions with a gentle rein; but how the infinite should coalesce with the finite, God with man, and thus transform the soul by planting therein the germ of almighty blessedness, they never by uninspired wisdom could comprehend. A mediator of unearthly excellence was indeed requisite; one who would realize in his person the loftiest ideas of beauty and sublimity, whose wisdom would be competent to elevate beyond mere morality, and whose grace would forever unfold the revelation of heavenly life.