They oftentimes impelled their victims to
suicide. The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the
regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants
and modern representatives. The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant
are their successors in malignity. The fair humanities of the old
religion were fair only in shape and exterior. The old pagan gods were
friendly only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for
the poor and lowly. Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no
alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld,
--rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers,
in the "Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and
drudge of some poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for a privileged
few.
It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion
"growing wild,"--that the human soil was prepared by such kind of
spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled
with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine
Sower,--that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were
genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to
be stigmatized or harshly characterized,--that without them the human
soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth.
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