character, and the condition of this immense and interesting portion of the population of our world.
The attainment of this knowledge is, however, as difficult as it is desirable. Not only do the remoteness of the period whence the information is to be obtained, and its recondite nature, offer formidable obstacles to the prosecution of this inquiry; but, in addition to these, we have the disadvantage of exploring an almost untrodden path. The philosophy of the ancients has been laboriously investigated; the mythologies of the several primitive nations have been elaborately detailed; early history and chronology come before us, elucidated by the labour, learning, and genius of the greatest authors of ancient and modern times but no writer of eminence with whose works I am acquainted, has done more than make a passing allusion, or give an incidental reference, to the religion of the ancient world, in the sense in which the term is here used.
Before entering on this investigation, it may be observed, that the religion of the Heathen world is not to be regarded as any invention or wayward aberration of the human mind; much less can it be considered as the result of any combination of human circumstances. Viewed in connexion with man's fall and its consequences, it is rather the substitution of an evil which the human mind, in its darkness and obliquity, and in its unextinguished aspirations after happiness, has chosen, instead of embracing that which God has prescribed as its satisfying portion. The worship of idols attests man's capacity for the worship of God. The adoration even of material elements is one of the collateral proofs of the possession and perversion of a noble attribute, which allies man with the spiritual world, and speaks his intended intercourse with Deity. Idolatry, in the nature of things, could not have been the original exercise of the human mind in respect of worship. While, therefore, this adoration, perverted from its Divine object, tends to prove the primitive purity of man, his devotional access to God, and his spiritual ruin through sin; its existence in human history exactly harmonizes with all these