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stones and pictures are the gods themselves!" Write were for are, and the prophecy is fulfilled.

Notice a little the wit of these ancients. "Here is money, my good woman—go buy you some geese and some gods therewith!" Horace makes a god say of himself, that his manufacturer doubted long whether to make his timber into a god or a bench.—"It is Jove," said Ovid, "whom we adore in the image of Jove."—Martial observes, "It is not the workman who makes the god, but he who adores it."—"The gods," saith Statius, "inhabit our minds and bosoms, and not the images of themselves." Is it not hard to conceive such a pitch of fancy as this worshipping idols, or, after the words of Maximus, worshipping a whole litter of gods? Every Greek and Roman capable of religious speculation knew full well that the inferior deities, the sons and daughters of heaven, earth, and hell, promiscuously, were but abbreviations of the wit and wisdom of the Homeric age—that they were virtues and vices personified. Very probably some of the illiterate, to whom a book was more than now a sealed and mysterious thing, adopted as literal the fables which the more educated cared not to explain to them. Hence the satire of the wit to an old woman, "Go buy you some geese and some gods!"

Even so the Egyptians, whose dwellings swarmed with embalmed cats, oxen and crocodiles, worshipped one only God, Knef, the father and master of the universe. Isis and Osiris were but children of the skies, no more liable to reproach than Gabriel and Michael, of orthodox repute.