Excerpt from The Heathen Religion: In Its Popular and Symbolical Development
Perhaps on no subject within the ample range of human knowledge, have so many fallacious ideas been propagated as upon that of the gods and the worship of heathen antiquity. Nothing but a shameful ignorance, a pitiable prejudice, or the most contemptible pride, which denounces all investigations as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith, or the modification of long cherished principles of science, can have thus misrepresented the theology of heathenism, and distorted - nay, caricatured - its forms of religious worship. It is time that posterity should raise its voice in vindication of violated truth, and that the present age should learn to recognize in the hoary past at least a little of that common sense of which it boasts with as much self-complacency, as if the prerogative of reason was the birthright only of modern times.
In our researches into the religion of the heathens, a just regard to truth requires that a proper distinction should be made between its successive stages of development, as well as between the different classes of society by whom it was professed.
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