Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: termed a glory, sometimes with the Hebrew word for God inscribed there, as at the summit of the ladder in a picture of Jacob's dream. In other instances an eye surrounded by a glory is employed, as in one of the masonic symbols. Raphael, however, has ventured farther, and has painted the Almighty as a venerable old man, according to the idea which I have analysed in the preceding pages. MYTHOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF GOD. Except, I believe, among Jews, Protestant Christians, and Mahometans, image worship has prevailed in all ages and nations of the world. The idea of God as derived from the person of man, has accordingly been the leading principle upon which such images have been formed ; though the idea has undergone in many instances very singular modifications, both in the peculiarity of figure and in the number of deities conceived; for it seems to be of the very nature of image-worship to multiply its objects. Egyptian Representations. In all cases where a belief in a multiplicity of gods has prevailed, one is represented as a chief or sovereign over the others. In ancient Egypt, accordingly, though as in Thebes, for example, Ammon (the Jupiter of the Greeks) appears to have been reckoned the superior deity, in most parts of Egypt this honour was conferred on Osiris, who is represented in human form. Plutarch, Juvenal, and Tibullus, represent Osiris as the son of Jupiter and Niobe; but whether this was the doctrine held by the Egyptians themselves is, I think, somewhat doubtful; for the accounts which are given by the Greeks are so much blended with theirown philosophy as to weaken thereby any dependence on their fidelity and accuracy. The gods of the Egyptians were so numerous that it would require a volume to enumerate them. They scrupled not indeed, it i...