worship devoured, in solemn banquets, the quivering limbs of the victims.  Let us not look for examples too far removed from the civilization which has produced our own.  In the Greek and Roman world, the stories of the gods were not very edifying, as every one knows:  the worship of Bacchus gave no encouragement to temperance, and the festivals of Venus were not a school of chastity.  It would be easy, by bringing together facts of this sort, to form a picture full of sombre coloring, and to conclude that our idea of God, the idea of the only and holy God, does not proceed from the impure sources of idolatry.  The proceeding would be brief and convenient; but such an estimation of the facts, false because incomplete, would destroy the value of the conclusion.  In pagan antiquity, in fact, the abominations of which I have just reminded you did not by themselves make up religious tradition.  Side by side with a current of darkness and impurity, we meet with a current of pure ideas and of strong gleams of the day.

Almost all the pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the Divine unity over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the Divine holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi.  It was a Greek who wrote these words:  “Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God, save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in a theatre at Athens that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two thousand years ago:  “May destiny aid me to preserve unsullied the purity of my words and of all my actions, according to those sublime laws which, brought forth in the celestial heights, have Heaven alone for their father, to which the race of mortal men did not give birth, and which oblivion shall never entomb.  In them is a supreme God, and one who waxes not old."[7] It would be easy to multiply quotations of this order, and to show you in the documents of Grecian and Roman civilization numerous traces of the knowledge of the only and holy God.  Listen now to a voice which has come forth actually from the recesses of the sepulchre:  it reaches us from ancient Egypt.

In Egypt, as you know, the degradation of the religious idea was in popular practice complete.  But, under the confused accents of superstition, the science of our age is succeeding in catching from afar the vibrations of a sublime utterance.  In the coffins of a large number of mummies have been discovered rolls of papyrus containing a sacred text which is called the Book of the Dead.  Here is the translation of some fragments which appear to date from a very remote epoch.  It is God who speaks:  “I am the Most Holy, the Creator of all that replenishes the earth, and of the earth itself, the habitation of mortals.  I am the Prince of the infinite ages.  I am the great and mighty God, the Most High, shining in the midst of the careering stars and of the armies which praise me above thy head....  It is I who chastise and who judge the evil-doers, and the persecutors of godly men.  I discover and confound the liars....  I am the all-seeing Judge and Avenger ... the guardian of my laws in the land of righteousness."[8]