The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials.

As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally confessed, that they deserved, if not the adoration, at least the reverence, of all mankind.

The deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed, in peace, their local and respective influence; nor could the Romans who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber, deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile.

The visible powers of nature, the planets, and the elements were the same throughout the universe.

The invisible governors of the moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mould of fiction and allegory.