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Updated: April 30, 2025
It is not worth while to deify him, or to speak with extravagant reverence, as if he had neither faults nor limitations. Yet it seems ungracious to recall these concerning one who did for his fellow men so much as Franklin did. Moral, intellectual, and material boons he conferred in such abundance that few such benefactors of the race can be named, though one should survey all the ages.
And when we further remember that their glorious literature was created by native genius, without the aid of Christianity, we are filled with amazement, and may almost be excused if we deify the reason of man. At least we are assured that literature as well as art may flourish under pagan influences, and that Christianity has a higher mission than the culture of the mind.
Thus we should deify oxen, horses, the ibis, hawks, asps, crocodiles, fishes, dogs, wolves, cats, and many other beasts. If we go back to the source of this superstition, we must equally condemn all the Deities from which they proceed.
In our love of the marvelous, a passion begotten of our pride, we have translated these effects into poetical inventions, because we did not understand them. It is so convenient to deify the incomprehensible! "I should, I own, lament over the loss of my illusions. I so much wished to believe in our twofold nature and in Swedenborg's angels. Must this new science destroy them?
These self-appointed queens maintain an absolute but ephemeral empire over that little fantastic aristocracy which they call the world admiration besets them, crowds attend them, conquests follow them, inferiors imitate them, rivals envy them, newspapers extol them, sonnets deify them.
"Like yourself I was curious to see a nation who seemed determined to court their own shame, and to deify the being whose career is signally marked by obloquy and disaster." "His day is pretty well over, I fancy," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly scenting an opportunity for a brilliant display of political knowledge. "That Irish business has settled him. They call him the greatest statesman of the age!
In former times the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote inheritance.
But while the deifiers of mere intellect are ever reminded that it alone cannot deify, but may be abused so as to demonise man, yet let those who slight it remember also that it is the head without whose inventive genius or directing skill the strong arms of labour would be idle.
They had not learnt to deify self-will, and to claim for each member of the human race a right to the indulgence of every eccentricity. They called themselves free, and boasted of their freedom; but their conception of liberty was that of all old nations, a freedom which not only allowed of discipline, but which grew out of it.
Then it must be maintained that humanity, since it is humanity that they deify, is neither progressive, nor contrasted in reason and feeling; in short, that it is infinite in everything, which is denied not only by history, but by psychology. This is not a correct understanding, cry the humanists.
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