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Updated: April 30, 2025
I, who laughed at passion as the outcome of temperament and easy living I, who thought in my intellect, to sound all the depths and shoals of human feeling I, who analysed my own soul scoffed at my own yearnings for an immortality am forced to deify the senseless power of my creed, and believe in God, that I may pray to Him.
Any one acquainted with ancient history knows that in that age of the world, and for centuries before, it had been almost a universal custom, especially in Greece and the Roman empire, to attribute some supernatural origin to, and deify their heroes, sometimes while they were yet alive, but most certainly after their death.
We are really so prejudiced by our education, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen; of which, with all due regard for antiquity, I take Leonidas and Curtius to have been two distinguished ones.
We deify the garments associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either party guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away.
But on the other hand many men of action have been deified not because they taught anything but because they seemed to be more than human forces. Râma is a classical example of such deification and many local deities can be shown to be warriors, bandits and hunters whose powers inspired respect. It is said that there is a disposition in the Bombay Presidency to deify the Maratha leader Śivaji.
They deify as God something which I can only translate by a word as underivable as God I mean Gumption. But it is part of their religion that there should be no temple to Gumption, nor are there priests or professors of Gumption Gumption being too ineffable to hit the sense of human definition and analysis.
Thus the apparent contradiction in the practice of these tribes, who venerate and almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt, kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to us: the people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for acting as they do.
But in attempting to deify the lost lackey, the grief of Hadrian was so immediate, that it is permissible to fancy that the lad's death was not one of those events which the emperor-astrologer noted beforehand on his calendar.
Shelley's Memorials are worthless, because they attempt to idealise and deify the poet; and then there is The Real Shelley, which is like a tedious legal cross-examination of a highly imaginative and sensitive creature by a shrewd and boisterous barrister. It would be very difficult to compose a formal biography of Shelley, because he was such a vague, imaginative, inconsistent creature.
This it is which Christianity has condemned, but which its ignorant ministers deify; who have as little desire to study Nature and man, as ability to read their Scriptures. But, indeed, what guide did the law follow in creating the domain of property? What principle directed it? What was its standard? Would you believe it? It was equality.
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