Godson

“ O my Saviour and Redeemer, Jesus of Nazareth, Who didst subject Thyself to travel as a fugitive upon earth, with no resting-place in which to remain in safety, yet hast now Thy throne at the right hand of Thy Father in the majesty of God, teach me to consider this world a foreign land, and my life that of a pilgrim, that in Thee and Thy Father I may find my home. Strengthen me by Thy grace to prepare myself worthily for the land of eternal happiness, and receive me, when I leave this world, into Thy glory, where Thou livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, for all eternity. ”

“ And the goddess answered: "There is just one remedy, my son, and it is in your hands." And Hero said: "Goddess, tell me quickly, that I may adopt it at once. What good would life be to us otherwise?"
Then the goddess said: "My son, there is no other man devoted to his master as you are: so you may learn how to save him. There is a temple to the Dreadful Goddess built by that king near his palace. If you sacrifice your son to her at once, then the king will not die. He will live another hundred years. ”

“ Imbued with soft tender feelings, she could not bear to see the altar of the goddes dyed red in human blood. But, in no other particulars, would she permit of any breach of observance. That goddess—the ruler of the universe—the dispenser of joys and sorrows—and the giver of final beatitude—now bade her in a dream to sacrifice her own life. ”

“ I cannot think where I saw the eyes like those of the goddess, but perhaps it was in that part of my life which is forgotten and ruled off with a line. It gave one the greatest and most majestic feelings to stand there with the gods, and to know that one was a god one's self, and that lightning did not hurt one, and that one would live for ever. ”

“ This deity remains even in name in the Greek Zeus, and Latin Jupiter, the Heaven-father, both religions keeping up its double sense of sky and sky-god, belonging to the barbaric theology which could see massive life in the over-arching firmament, and could explain that life by an in-dwelling deity, modelled on the human soul. We may best understand what was meant by the Heaven-god, if we think of him as the soul of the sky. Among all the relics of barbaric religion which surround us, few are more striking than the phrases which still recognise as a deity the living sky, as “Heaven forgive me!” ”

“ This demi-god, to whom divine honours are often paid after his withdrawal from the earth, is usually the Son of the Sun, or of the Demiurgic Creator, the Great Father, who stands at the head of the primitive pantheons and subordinate only to the Supreme Unity; he is born of an earthly mother, a virgin, and often a vestal of the Sun, who conceives in a mysterious manner, and who, after giving birth to her half-divine son, is herself sometimes elevated to the rank of a goddess. ”

“ It may be the Gethsemane of struggle, and poverty and care;—it may be the Gethsemane of long and weary sickness;—it may be the Gethsemane of farewells that wring the heart by the deathbeds of those we love;—it may be the Gethsemane of remorse, and of well-nigh despair, for sins that we will not—but which we say we cannot—overcome. Well, my dearest sister, in that Gethsemane—aye, even in that Gethsemane of sin—no angel merely,—but Christ Himself who bore the burden of our sins,—will, if we seek Him, come to comfort us. He will, if being in agony, we pray. ”

“ Even as we read of the angels in heaven, that not all of them stood, and persevered in their original sinlessness and integrity, so of the Jogees some, partaking of the divine power, were also under the direction of a will celestial and divine, while others, having derived, we must suppose, a mighty and miraculous power from the gift of God, afterwards abused it by applying it to capricious, or, as it should seem, to malignant purposes. ”

“ This poem appeared in early editions of On viol and Flute, but is now omitted from Mr. Gosse’s poems.
There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals,
Whose form is not like unto man’s, and as unlike his nature;
But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten,
With human sensations and voice and corporeal members;
So, if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man’s fashion,
And trace out with chisel or brush their conception of Godhead,
Then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen,
Each kind the divine with its own form and nature endowing. ”

“ My lord, there is nothing, which at all times I have taken more pains to subdue, than that overweening pride, and immeasurable conceit, which are the principal features of your lordship's character. Nature, indeed, has furnished you with one corrective to them, or they must infallibly have damned you. It is timidity. Other people may laugh at this quality. For my part I esteem it worthy the loudest praise and most assiduous cultivation. When the balance hangs in doubt between the adventurousness of vanity and the frigidity of fear, ever incline to the latter side. ”

“ Homeric and other legends surrounding the history of the goddess, but we can well imagine that a deity who was the subject of so much attention and so much prayer, could rest in the hearts of the people only as one with every supreme earthly charm, combined with a divine bearing and dignity. ”

“ On the Mount of Transfiguration the Divine Life, as we have seen, reached its culminating point, its perihelion as we may call it, where it touched the very heavens for one brief night, passing through its out-streaming glories and crossing the paths of celestials. In Gethsemane we have the antipodal fact; we see the Divine Life in its far aphelion, where it touches hell itself, moving round in an awful gloom, and crossing the paths of the "powers of darkness." ”

“ Many more gods and goddesses were there in the wonder days of long ago, but of only one more may I stay to tell you now.
The great god Pan, protector of the shepherds and their flocks, was half man, half goat. Every one loved this strange god, who yet ofttimes startled mortals by his wild and wilful ways. When to-day a sudden, needless fear overtakes a crowd, and we say a panic has fallen upon it, we are using a word which we learned from the name of this old pagan god. ”

“ They offered incense and prayers to statues, deaf and mute. They recognized as gods animals, reptiles, and even plants. They did not blush to adore an adulterous Mars, a prostituted Venus, an incestuous Juno, a Jupiter blackened by every kind of crime, and worthy for that reason to hold the first rank among the gods. See what our fathers were, and what we ourselves should have been, had not the light of the Gospel dissipated our darkness! Each story in fable, every circumstance in the life of the gods, ought at once to fill us with confusion, admiration and gratitude. ”

“ The sensual shall wear the shaggy vesture of the goat, or foam and whet his horrid tusks, a wild and untame’d boar. But virtue prepares its possessor for the skies. Upon the upright and the good, attendant angels wait. With heavenly spirits they converse. On them the dark machinations of witchcraft, and the sullen spirits of darkness have no power. Even the outward form is impressed with a beam of celestial lustre. By slow, but never ceasing steps, they tread the path of immortality and honour. Then, mortals, love, support, and cherish each other. ”

“ Idolatry, and the worship of other Gods than one, were held to be crimes worthy of the utmost abhorrence and the severest punishment. There was no medium between the worship of heaven and hell. All adoration was to be directed to God the Creator through the mediation of his only begotten Son; or, if prayers were addressed to inferior beings, and the glorified spirits of his saints, at least they terminated in the Most High, were a deprecation of his wrath, a soliciting his favour, and a homage to his omnipotence. ”

“ Here’s to the nobility of their anguish when they come to learn we are no more; and the beauty of their faces when the divinity in their hearts tells the story upon their care-lined foreheads that they would climb the same weary Golgotha again—go through the same Gethsemane—bear the same cross—though they knew all along the end which it meant. ”

“ When this eternal divine Consciousness always present in every human being, this God in man, takes possession partly [4] or wholly of the human consciousness and becomes in visible human shape the guide, teacher, leader of the world, not as those who living in their humanity yet feel some- thing of the power or light or love of the divine Gnosis informing and conducting them, but out of that divine Gnosis itself, direct from its central force and plenitude, then we have the manifest Avatar. The inner Divinity is the eternal Avatar in man ”

“ He whispers to us of the prophet who saw the gods one night as they strode knee-deep in stars, and above them a mighty hand, showing a higher power. The gods are jealous of him that he has seen, so they rob him of knowledge of the gods, of moon and sky, of butterflies and flowers, and all lovely things. ”

“ The Saints were all at once driven from heaven; and senses, thought, and heart were turned from a divine mother with a tender child, to the grown man doing good and suffering evil, who was later transfigured into a being half-divine in its nature, and then recognised and honoured as God himself. ”

“ There is a kind of lanthorns, your lordship has seen them, that have one side dark, and the other light. I remember to have observed your lordship for half a day together, poring over the picture of Guy Faux, in the Book of Martyrs. This was one of the early intimations which my wisdom enabled me to remark of the destination which nature had given you. You know, my lord, that the possessor of this lanthorn can turn it this way and that, as he pleases. He can contrive accurately to discern the countenance of every other person, without being visible himself. ”

“ The Sun and Moon, which are the greater lights in the Heaven, I take to have been the chiefest Idols worshipped by the Heathen people. Notwithstanding, their blind devotion deified also the other Planets, and that numberless number of lesser lights, called in Scripture, Militia Cœli, The Host of Heaven, whose several natures, properties and influences, are not distinctly known. In like manner there is an Host of Idols mentioned in Holy Writ, of whom little or nothing is spoken to the purpose by Authors, more than their very names. ”

“ The heathen priestesses, who sacrificed at the oaks of their gods, were venerable women, while that slender figure bore all the witchery of youth, and looked much too gentle for such a horrible craft! So much spiritual tenderness lay in her large, widely-opened gazelle-like eyes, and besides--many, many centuries ago the days of Paganism had passed away, even although then, as now, the waves beat upon the strand, and the tops of the oaks rustled, for we live in the nineteenth century ”

“ But the three gods did not stand by themselves. The mythical personification of nature, of which all three were in at least one aspect the products, required that each of them should be coupled with a goddess, and in each case it appears that originally the goddess was a more powerful and important personage than the god. ”

“ That the ancients had an idea of the Human [linked with their idea] of the Divine, is manifest from the appearances of the Divine to Abraham, Lot, Joshua, Gideon, Manoah, his wife and others, who, although they saw God as a man, still adored Him as the God of the universe, calling him the God of heaven and earth, and Jehovah. ”

“ A host of companions, guides, helpers, about him from of old time, “the very court and company of heaven,” objects for him of personal reverence and affection—the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods determined the character of much of his daily life, and might prove the last stay of human nature at its weakest. “In every time and place,” he had said, “it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods.” And when he said “Worship the gods!” ”

“ Then the angel of the LORD departed out of his sight.
22 And when Gideon perceived that he was an angel of the LORD, Gideon said, Alas, O Lord God! for because I have seen an angel of the LORD face to face.
23 And the LORD said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die. ”

“ No giant ever came so near to the ranks of the gods: were it possible for one not born a god to become divine by dint of ambition and devotion, this glory would have crowned the Titanic labours of Ben Jonson! ”

“ The day of the greatest distress is God's time to appear for his people's relief.
2. Let us now see what passed between the angel and Gideon, who knew not with certainty, till after he was gone, that he was an angel, but supposed he was a prophet.
(1.) The angel accosted him with respect, and assured him of the presence of God with him, v. 12. He calls him a mighty man of valour, perhaps because he observed how he threshed his corn with all his might; and seest thou a man diligent in his business? whatever his business is, he shall stand before kings. ”

“ In all mythologies, the trait of all others which most commonly occurs, is that of the descent of the Gods to earth, where, in human form, they mix among mortals, and occupy themselves with their affairs, either out of a spirit of adventure, or to try the hearts of men. Such a conception is shocking to the Christian notion of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God ”