Travels in China, Sir John Barrow [phonics readers txt] 📗

But the priests, who, in all ages and in most nations, have been crafty enough to turn to their own account the credulity and superstitions of the people, having once established as a religious duty the offering of sweet-smelling herbs and other perfumes, found little difficulty in persuading the multitude, that that the tutelar spirits could eat as well as smell, and that sacrifices and meat-offerings would be acceptable to the gods. The priests of China lost no time in introducing sacrifices, even of living creatures, and offerings of corn and rice and wine and precious metals upon their altars, not however to that extent which was practised in the temples of Greece and Rome, whose gods were the most mercenary of all nations, being rarely induced to grant a favour without a fee. Nor in modern days have the monks and priests of the Catholic faith been backward in this respect particularly in sanctioning the doctrine of composition for sins, for the absolution of which the rate was not even fixed in proportion to the magnitude; and what is still more astonishing, this impious practice of bargaining with the Almighty has survived the dark ages, and exists to a certain degree at this moment.

The moral and religious opinions of Confucius were, in fact, too sublime and too metaphysical to preserve their purity among a people so unprepared, as his countrymen were, to receive and cherish them. The attention of the multitude would seem, indeed, in all nations to require being fixed on something gross and material. How difficult was it for the priest and the leader of the Jews, to restrain their people from practices of idolatry. In the short absence even of Moses on Mount Sinai, they made for themselves a molten calf of gold as an object of divine worship, in imitation, probably, of what they had beheld in the temples of Egypt. The invisible god made little impression on their gross and untutored understandings. Nor was Numa more successful than Moses or Confucius, in his attempt to establish among the people the worship of an ideal or mental object of adoration. Thus also it happened with the Chinese. The sublime conceptions of their great philosopher, too refined indeed for untutored human nature, they could not comprehend. They required some visible object on which they might fix their attention. It was not enough merely to imagine that the spirits of men, who had done their duty in this life, were permitted to haunt the places where their bodies were interred, or where their surviving friends should assemble to do them honour: it was necessary to give them a form and substance. In the same manner was the purity of the Christian religion contaminated by the multitude of images that were invented in the monkish ages, when every city, town, and church, and even individuals, provided they could pay for them, had their particular patron, or tutelar saint.

Like the temples of Confucius, those of the ancient Egyptians are supposed to have been entirely free from statues; and Herodotus seems to be of opinion, that Hesiod and Homer were the first who introduced the genealogy of the gods among the Greeks; imposed names upon each, assigned their functions and their honours, and clothed them in their several forms. And we learn from Silius Italicus, that the ancient temple of Hercules at Gades had no visible type of the Deity.