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About The Book: This ignorance could not annihilate the principle of religion in the spirit of man ; but in taking away the awful repression of the idea of one exclusive sovereign Divinity, it left that spirit to fabricate its religion in its own manner. And as the creating of gods might be the most appropriate way of celebrating the deliverance from the most imposing idea of one Supreme Being, depraved and insane invention took this direction with ardor. The mind threw a fictitious divinity into its own Phantasms, and into the objects in the visible world. It is amazing to observe how, when one solemn principle was taken away, the promiscuous numberless crowd of almost all shapes of fancy and of matter became, as it were, instinct with ambition, and mounted into gods. They were alternately the toys and the tyrants of their miserable creator. They appalled him often, and often he could make sport with them. For overawing him by their supposed power, they made him a compensation by descending to a fellowship with his follies and vices. But indeed this was a condition of their creation; they must own their mortal progenitor by sharing his depravity, even amidst the lordly domination assigned to them over him and the universe. We may safely affirm, that the mighty artificer of deifications, the corrupt soul of man, never once, in its almost infinite diversification of device in their production, struck out a form of absolute goodness. No, if there were ten thousand deities, there should not be one that should be authorized by perfect rectitude in itself to punish him; not one by which it should be possible for him to be rebuked without having a right to recriminate. About The Author: John Foster (1770–1843) was an English Baptist minister and essayist. The son of a weaver, born in Halifax, Yorkshire, and educated for the ministry at the Baptist college in Bristol, Foster served as a minister for a number of years. Becoming a full-time writer, he contributed nearly 200 articles to the Eclectic Review. His works include Essays, in a Series of Letters (1804), and Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance (1820), in which he urged the necessity of a national system of education. He was the eldest son of John Foster, a small farmer, weaver and Baptist, living at Wadsworth Lane in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, born 17 September 1770. From a young age he assisted his parents in spinning and weaving wool. At age 17 he became a member of the Baptist congregation at Hebden Bridge; and soon after was "set apart" as minister by a special religious service, and went to reside at Brearley Hall with John Fawcett, who was directing the studies of some Baptist students. After three years here he entered the Baptist College, Bristol, in September 1791, remaining there till May 1792, and then entering on the regular work of a preacher. In 1818, while at Downend, Foster published his Discourse on Missions. Two volumes of his Broadmead Chapel lectures were published. In 1820, he published his essay On the Evils of Popular Ignorance, based on a sermon preached on behalf of the British and Foreign School Society in 1818. It speedily went into a second edition, heavily revised. In 1825 he completed an introductory essay to Philip Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion for the series of Select Christian Authors published by William Collins of Glasgow. The period of the missionary controversy brought Introductory Observations to Dr. Marshman's Statement (London, 1828).