When indeed I call to mind the general tendency of the natural man to multiply to himself the objects of religious worship, and to create, by the help of superstition, and the delusive workings of the imagination, a variety of unearthly beings whose wrath he must appease, or whose favour he may conciliate; when I reflect how great is the temptation in unenlightened or fraudulent teachers to accommodate the dictates of truth to the prejudices and desires of those whom they instruct, my wonder is rather that Christianity was so long preserved pure and uncontaminated in this respect, than that corruptions should gradually and stealthily have mingled themselves with the simplicity of Gospel worship.  That tendency is plainly evinced by the history of every nation under heaven:  Greek and Barbarian, Egyptian and Scythian, would have their gods many, and their lords many.  From one they would look for one good; on another they would depend for a different benefit, in mind, body, and estate.  Some were of the highest grade, and to be worshipped with supreme honours; others were of a lower rank, to whom an inferior homage was addressed; whilst a third class held a sort of middle place, and were approached with reverence as much above the least, as it fell short of the greatest.  In the heathen world you will find exact types of the dulia, the hyperdulia, and the latria, with which unhappily the practical theology of modern Christian Rome is burdened.  Indeed, my wonder is, that under the Christian dispensation, when the household and local gods, the heathen’s tutelary deities, and the genii, had been dislodged by the light of the Gospel, saints and angels had not at a much {98} earlier period been forced by superstition to occupy their room.

We shall be led to refer to some passages in the earliest Christian writers, especially in Origen, which bear immediately on this point, representing in strong but true colours the futility of deeming a multitude of inferior divinities necessary for the dispensation of benefits throughout the universe, whose good offices we must secure by acts of attention and worship.  I anticipate the circumstance in this place merely to show that the tendency of the human mind, clinging to a variety of preternatural protectors and benefactors, was among the obstacles with which the first preachers of the Gospel had to struggle.  In the proper place I shall beg you to observe how hardly possible it would have been for those early Christian writers, to whom I have referred above, to express themselves in so strong, so sweeping, and so unqualified a manner, had the practice of applying by invocation to saints and angels then been prevalent among the disciples of the Cross.