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to posterity some account of the great events of those forgotten ages.
The next remove in the history of this art is its employment in the
production of the images of idolatrous worship; and, when confined to
this purpose, it never attained any appreciable excellence. The purely
heathen mind was incapable of conceiving those forms of ideal beauty
which are born of the contemplation of a divine and spiritual beauty
revealed in the word of God and the teachings of his immaculate Son.

The grotesque Egyptian images worshipped on the Nile before the building
of the pyramids, are, judging from the best preserved antiquities, not
very much inferior to the gilded deities to be seen to-day in the
thousand pagodas of heathen lands.

Take for example a Chinese idol of modern make: while it is less angular
and more elaborately finished than the ancient monstrosities found in
Egypt, still, so far as perfection of form or beauty of expression is
concerned, there is little to choose between the two. Each is a fitting
type of the degree of civilization and soul culture of the peoples that
produced them. It must not be urged that the success of sculpture in
Greece and Rome disproves the proposition that the art could not develop
itself among a strictly idolatrous race.

The splendid mythologies of the Greeks and Romans must not be considered
as the highest forms even of the worship of idols or inanimate things.
The gods and goddesses of these mythological systems were principally
the powers that were supposed to preside over the different forces and
elements of nature, and were invested with the celestial attributes of a
higher order of beings. Neptune ruled the sea, Pluto was director of
ceremonies in the infernal regions, while Jupiter was emperor of the sky
and king of all the lesser gods.

These deities were the invention of a cultivated intellect, a refined
taste and polished civilization, and furnish a striking proof of man's
longing after the Infinite, unguided by the star of revelation.

The imaginative Greeks did not worship the statues of the gods _per se_,
but only admired them as the fitting representations of those mysterious
forces that hold sway over earth, air, fire, and water, or reverenced
them as the symbols of noble sentiments or sublime passions. The thing
itself, the cunning but lifeless figure, was only incidental, while the
idea thus typified was the real incentive to worship. This was also the
age that p