these terms of a common understanding between them. "Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh, thy Alehim, giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever JAO, our Alehim, shall drive out from before us, them will we possess. Nor is it at all concealed, that the power of JAO, as much as of any other topical god, was confined to the province over which he presided. "The JAO Alehim of Israel, fought for Israel,+ and JAO drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." The God of Israel was no match for the tutelary deities of the valley. The first commandment of the decalogue involves a virtual recognition of the existence, and rival, if not equal claims of other deities. "Thou shalt have none other gods but me," is no mandate that could have issued from one who had been entirely satisfied of his own supremacy, and that those to whom he had once revealed himself, were in no danger of giving a preference to the idols of the Gentiles. To say nothing of the highest implied compliment to those idols, in the confession of JAO, that he was jealous of his people's attachment. "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God," Exod. xx. He was Lord of heaven and earth, &c. in such sense as the Emperor of China, the Grand Sultan, &c.,-by courtesy. It would be difficult to imagine, and surely impossible to find, among all the formularies of ancient Paganism, any manner of speaking ascribed to their deities more truly contemptible, more egregiously absurd and revolting to common sense, than the language which their lively oracles put into the mouth of their deity. Sometimes he is described as roaring like a lion, at others as hissing like a snake, as burning with rage, and unable to restrain his own passions, as kicking, smiting, cursing, swearing, smelling, vomiting, repenting, being grieved at his heart, his fury coming up in his face, his nostrils smoking, &c. For which our Christian divines have invented the apology," that these things are spoken thus, in accommodation to the weakness of human conceptions," and avрwπожа wс as humanly suffering; without, however, allowing benefit of the same apology, to throw any sort of palliation over the grossnesses of the literal sense of the Pagan theology. It is well known, that the Pagan worJudges xi. 24. Judges i. 19. And note well, that this Chemosh, called in 1 Kings xi. 7. the abomination of Moab, is none other than the Christian Messiah, or Sun of Righteousness, of Malachi iii. 20, or iv. 2. + Joshua x. 42. ship by no means involved such a real prostration of intellect, and such an absolute surrender of the senses and reason, as is involved in the Christian notion of paying divine honours. It often meant no more than a habit of holding the thing so said to be worshipped, in a particular degree of attachment, as many Christians carry about them a lucky penny, or a curious pebble, keepsakes or mementos of past prosperity, or something which is to recall to their minds those agreeable associations of idea, which Lingering haunt the greenest spot On mem'ry's waste." Thus the Egyptian's worship of onions, however at first view ridiculous and childish, and exposing him to the scorn and sarcasm both of Christian and Heathen satirists;* in his own view and representation of the matter, (which surely is as fairly to be taken into the account as the representations of those who would never give themselves the trouble to investigate what had once moved their laughter,) by no means implied that he took the onion itself to be a god, or forgot or neglected its culinary uses as a vegetable. The respect he paid to it referred to a high and mystical order of astronomical speculations, and was purely emblematical. The onion presented to the eye of the Egyptian visionary, the most curious type in nature of the disposition and arrangement of the great solar system. "Supposing the root and top of the head to represent the two poles, if you cut any one transversely or diagonally, you will find it divided into the same number of spheres, including each other, counting from the sun or centre to the circumference, as they knew the motions or courses of the orbs (or planets) divided the fluid system of the heavens into; and so the divisions represented the courses of those orbs." This observation of Mr. Hutchinson+ has since been made or borrowed by Dr. Shaw, who observes, that "the onion, upon account of the root of it, which consists of many coats enveloping each other, like the orbs (orbits) in the planetary system, was another of their sacred vegetables." Our use of these observations, how*Porrum et cepe nefas violare et frangere morsu. O sanctas gentes, qubius hæc nascuntur in hortis Numina ! Juvenal Sat. 15. lin. 9. 11. O holy Shaw's Travels, p. 356. A sin, forsooth, to violate and break by biting the leek and onions. ever, is only to supply a demonstration that the grossest forms of apparent nonsense and absurdity in which Paganism ever existed, were never more distressed for a good excuse, or the pretence of some plausible emblematical and mystical sense, than Judaism, and that if we acquit the Jewish religion from the charge of extreme folly, there was never any religion on earth that could be fairly convicted of it. The plurality of the Hebrew word ALEIM, for God, in the first chapter of Genesis, and in the Old Testament throughout, is urged by orthodox divines as an argument for their favourite doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Jews find their text thus burthened with a sense which they themselves disclaim. A similar plural word— THE HEAVENS-expressive of precisely the same sense, where plurality is by no means the leading idea, is found in our own language, and among all nations whose ideas of deity were drawn as our own evidently are, from the visible heavens, the imaginary ceiling of an upper story, in which the Deity was supposed to reside. The Hebrew D Shemmim, and the Chaldee N Shemmai, are in like manner plural words-literally, the heavens, and used synonymously with D Alehim-the gods-for God.* The pagans used the same plural words, the gods, for GOD, although it was to one being alone that in the stricter sense that title was applicable. We use precisely the same plural form, "Heavens defend us!" synechdochically for God defend us! as in that beautiful and moral apostrophe of King Lear 66 Take physic, pomp! Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, SHAKSPEARE. that is, show God more just. This, our adherence to the Pagan phrase, happens to be consecrated by the text of the New Testament,+ in Daniel iv. 26. "Thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee after that thou shalt have known that THE HEAVENS do rule," i. e. that Gop, i. e. that the MOST HIGH, above our heads, doth rule. By the heavens, says Parkhurst, are signified the true Aleim, or persons of Jehovah. Heb. Lex. p. 741. 1. + Matt. xxi. 25.-Mark xi. 30, 31. Η βασιλεία των ερανών. Η βασιλεια το Θεό. Luke xv. 18. xx. 4, 5.—John iv. 27. The kingdom of the heavens and the kingdom of God are throughout Matthew and Mark interchangeable. which the kingdom of the heavens, and the kingdom of God, and GOD, and THE HEAVENS, are perfectly synonymous, and used indifferently for the expression of precisely the same sense. Not a plurality of THREE, then, nor of any definite number, was implied by that plural noun used with a verb singular, in the Jewish Alehim, but merely that vague reference to the planets, from which the very name of God is derived, and to which the primitive idea of all the multifarious modifications of idolatry or piety, superstition or religion, may ultimately be traced. The Jews themselves are as justly chargeable with polytheism, as the nations whose spiritual advantages they affect to despise. Their historian, Josephus, who lived and wrote about sixty years after Christ, sought in vain for the testimony of Egyptian authors to support the high pretensions he advanced. Not one has so much as mentioned the prodigies of Moses, or held out the least glimpse of probability or coincidence to his romantic tale. The whole fable of Moses, however, will be found in the Orphic verses sung in the orgies of Bacchus, as celebrated in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, for ages before such a people as the Jewish nation were known to be in existence. (See the chapter on Bacchus, in this DIEGESIS.) Christianity, however, is not so essentially connected with the Jewish religion as to stand or fall with it. Paley and other of the shrewder advocates of the established faith have intimated their wish that the two systems were considered as more independent of each other than they are generally held to be. There might be evidence enough left for the Christian religion, though Oeos which is the source of the Æolic dialect, or Latin DEUS, from @ew Deew, currere, to run as do the planets. The Grecian philosophers generally believed that nature is God. No authors of any order of Christians whatever, in any of their writings, give us any positive idea on the subject, nor indeed any negative one, not derived from some or other of those philosophers. "The Yêsûs of the New Testament preached only a sort of indeterminate, or at most, only Pharisaical deism. Those who have professed and called themselves Christians, have been hardly such characters as any rational mind could imagine to have been the followers of such a master. Animated only with a furious zeal against idolatry, to which Yêsûs does not allude, these iconoclasts (image-breakers) seem to have maintained few positive metaphysical dogmata, till they wanted excuses for plundering from one another the plunder of Paganism."-I take this sentence from a treatise, entitled, Various Definitions of an Important Word, p. 18., in a printed but unpublished work of a learned and excellent friend. the Mosaic dispensation were considered as altogether fabulous; and some have thought, that the evidence of Christianity would gain by a dissolution of partnership; and a man might be the better Christian, as he certainly would be better able to defend his Christianity, by throwing over the whole of the Old Testament as indefensible, and contenting himself entirely with the sufficient guidance and independent sanctions of the New. "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,"* is an apothegm which Christians receive as of the highest authority: and yet no conceivable sense can be found in those words, short of an indication not only of distinctness, but of absolute contrariety of character, between the two religions. "Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ," in the antithesis, can imply nothing else than that neither grace nor truth came by Moses; to say nothing of those innumerable contemptuous manners of speaking of the old dispensation, as "those weak and beggarly elements," and that "burthen which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear ;"‡ "all that ever came before me are thieves and robbers;"§ in which Christ and the Apostles themselves refer to the religion of Moses. Certainly, none with whom we have to deal would ever care to defend Judaism, if once induced to doubt the independent challenges of Christianity. If this be untenable, that may very well be left to shift for itself in the wardrobes of Holywell-street and the Minories. "The lion preys not upon carcases!" It is unquestionable, however, that even if the gospel story were altogether a romance, and all its dramatis persona, as connected with what is called in poetical language, its machinery, merely imaginary, it is still a romance of that character, which mixes up its fantastical personages with real characters, and fastens events which never happened, speeches which were never spoken, and doings which were never done, on persons, times, and places that had a real existence, and stood in the relations assigned to them. So that the romance is properly dramatical, and answers to the character of such ingenious and entertaining fictions, as in our own days are called romances of the particular century to which they are assigned, in which of course we have the Sir Rowlands, Sir Olivers, and Sir Mortimers of the author's invention, |