f
these three poets a perceptible difference is recognizable, which
reflects the changes that verbal recitations necessarily and
imperceptibly undergo.]

[Footnote 161: "Metaphysics," bk. i. ch. iv.]

Now whether this "first principle," called "_Love_," "the cause of
motion and of union" in the universe, was regarded as a personal Being,
and whether, as the ancient scholiast taught, Hesiod's love was "the
heavenly Love, which is also God, that other love that was born of Venus
being junior," is just now of no moment to the argument. The more
important inference is, that amongst the gods of Pagan theology but
_one_ is self-existent, or else none are. Because the Hesiodian gods,
which are, in fact, all the gods of the Greek mythology, "were either
all of them derived from chaos, love itself likewise being generated out
of it; or else love was supposed to be distinct from chaos, and the
active principle of the universe, from whence, together with chaos, all
the theogony and cosmogony was derived."[162] Hence it is evident the
poets did not teach the existence of a multiplicity of unmade,
self-existent, independent deities.

[Footnote 162: "Cudworth," vol. i. p. 287.]

The careful reader of Cudworth will also learn another truth of the
utmost importance in this connection, viz., _that the theogony of the
Greek poets was, in fact, a cosmogony_, the generation of the gods
being, in reality, the generation of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the
stars, and all the various powers and phenomena of nature. This is dimly
shadowed forth in the very names which are given to some of these
divinities. Thus Helios is the sun, Selena is the moon, Zeus the
sky--the deep blue heaven, Eos the dawn, and Erse the dew. It is
rendered still more evident by the opening lines of Hesiod's
"Theogonia," in which he invokes the muses:

"Hail ye daughters of Jupiter! Grant a delightsome song.
Tell of the race of immortal gods, always existing,
Who are the offspring of the earth, of the starry sky,
And of the gloomy night, whom also the ocean nourisheth.
Tell how the gods and the earth at first were made,
And the rivers, and the mighty deep, boiling with waves,
And the glowing stars, and the broad heavens above,
And the gods, givers of good, born of these."

Where we see plainly that the generation of the gods is the generation
of the earth, the heaven, the stars, the seas, the rivers, and other
things p