This view of heathen religions is probably much exaggerated.  They must contain more truth than error, and must have been, on the whole, useful to mankind.  We do not believe that they originated in human fraud, that their essence is superstition, that there is more falsehood than truth in their doctrines, that their moral tendency is mainly injurious, or that they continually degenerate into greater evil.  No doubt it may be justly predicated of all these systems that they contain much which is false and injurious to human virtue.  But the following considerations may tend to show that all the religions of the earth are providential, and that all tend to benefit mankind.

To ascribe the vast phenomena of religion, in their variety and complexity, to man as their author, and to suppose the whole a mere work of human fraud, is not a satisfactory solution of the facts before us.  That priests, working on human ignorance or fear, should be able to build up such a great mass of belief, sentiment, and action, is like the Hindoo cosmogony, which supposes the globe to rest on an elephant, the elephant on a turtle, and the turtle on nothing at all.

If the people were so ignorant, how happened the priests to be so wise?  If the people were so credulous, why were not the priests credulous too?  “Like people, like priests,” is a proverb approved by experience.  Among so many nations and through so many centuries, why has not some one priest betrayed the secret of the famous imposition?  Apply a similar theory to any other human institution, and how patent is its absurdity!  Let a republican contend that all other forms of government—­the patriarchal system, government by castes, the feudal system, absolute and limited monarchies, oligarchies, and aristocracies—­are wholly useless and evil, and were the result of statecraft alone, with no root in human nature or the needs of man.  Let one maintain that every system of law (except our own) was an invention of lawyers for private ends.  Let one argue in the same way about medicine, and say that this is a pure system of quackery, devised by physicians, in order to get a support out of the people for doing nothing.  We should at once reply that, though error and ignorance may play a part in all these institutions, they cannot be based on error and ignorance only.  Nothing which has not in it some elements of use can hold its position in the world during so long a time and over so wide a range.  It is only reasonable to say the same of heathen or ethnic religions.  They contain, no doubt, error and evil.  No doubt priestcraft has been carried very far in them, though not further perhaps than it has sometimes been carried in Christianity.  But unless they contained more of good than evil, they could not have kept their place.  They partially satisfied a great hunger of the human heart.  They exercised some restraint on human wilfulness and passion.  They have directed, however imperfectly, the human