human passions good and bad, became the sole object of worship of the common people, instead of the One God.

That one idea, then, the original import of Θεός, once lost in gross idolatry, Θεός no longer implied "Heaven," as "the One God"; but it now chiefly meant "a god" only,—one of the many "gods" habitually supposed to inhabit Heaven. And, although, as Eusebius remarks (Præp.Ev.lib.iii.p.141, ed. Col.), πρώτιστα πάντων τὸν πρῶτον^{(Greek characters)}, yet such a religion was not that of the many. But, ^{(Greek characters)}, "while saying they ought to worship the celestial and the æthereal gods first; ^{(Greek characters)};" then, in the second place, the good spirits; thirdly, the souls of great men; and, fourthly, to propitiate the evil spirits; yet ^{(Greek characters)}, "they, in fact, mixed it up altogether," ^{(Greek characters)} "serving, out of all those, the powers of evil alone, and giving themselves up wholly to worship them."

It would be wrong to affirm that they all wilfully did so. Yet it is true that even the greatest and the best of them were led passively, by "the vanity of