tively so; for the insufficiency of human reason to comprehend by any kind of abstraction the attributes of Deity, makes men fly for refuge to revelation; but then, the heathens had no revelation, ge ́neral or special, save that which Nature herself gives to all: but Nature's revelation teaches not the existence of a God, but rather leads the mind to a Pantheistical philosophy, which is a philosophy that in fact, shuts out all, save matter and motion, from the world. No; if we desire a proof of God's existence, we must seek it in the Scripture, where we read that God, by the mouth of Moses, said unto the Children of Israel, "And I will take you to me for a people; and I will be to you a God; and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians."

If in this our day science is in its cradle, and rocked by superstition-if philosophers with all their boasted knowledge, are ignorant-whether heat be itself a substance, a subtle fluid, or merely a condition of substances-if none, however learned, can teach us the precise nature of the brilliant Star which seems to be the parent of life and vegetation--if we are ignorant whether the Sun is a ball of flame, or as thought by Anaxagorus, a huge red hot stone, or as others, that it is an opaque body, more or less dense, surrounded by an atmosphere of a brilliant and luminous appearance, the grand source of heat and light, or as the heathens supposed, and millions now believe, that it is the seat or residence of intelligent deitiesit will be perhaps wise in us to hazard no conjectures upon the subject, which would be but adding one more to the million and one idle theories which have been ventured thereon, proving little else but the ingenuity of those who use them. No; it is rather our duty to clap an extinguisher upon so curious a spirit, which contenteth not itself with things, the nature and properties of which lie open to our investigations. Scripture is dumb as to what the Sun really is; and however unsatisfactory what is therein contained, touching the matter, may be to inquisitive philosophers, it has the negative merit of being as good as any other. All we are there told being, that God made the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, together with all things else; and "he made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the Stars also;" but, as before hinted, what is contained in the book of Genesis affecting the creation, is a mere cosmogonic fable, most

likely picked up by Moses in his commerce with the Egyptians; as we read that he was skilled in all the learning of that people.

The god of day, or the god Sun, was the great god of the ancient world, and has been worshipped by every people on the globe; we shall find that it prevailed in both continents—the old as well as the new world, and was personified in all the sacred allegories, and poetically described as suffering the destiny of mortals; everywhere we read of the birth, death, and resurrection of the Sun; he had his cradle and his tomb, whether called Adonis, Osiris, Hercules, Bacchus, Atys, Chrishna, Mithra, or Christ!

In Ethiopia the worship of the Sun prevailed, and temples of a most magnificent character were erected in honour of that deity; and symbols of his power, strength and glory, were placed therein to receive the homage of the adorers; but the people of Ethiopia were black, and among them, as we may readily suppose, black was the most orthodox and beautiful of colours: and, as when human beings personify their ideas, and " giye to airy nothing a local habitation and a name" when they conceive of good and bad deities-they invest them with all those attributes which to themselves seem good or bad; hence in our own climate, gods and angels are delicately fair, with ruddy complexions, sweet and most heavenly countenances: whereas the devil and his imps are of a dense sooty blackness; strange heaps of ugliness, oddly compounded of every conceivable deformity; so that if the deformed, whether in body or mind, are objects of pity, then the devil and his unfortunate companions should keep our eyes eternally moist; and truly, as one of our modern orators has expressed it-these devils, as depicted by Christians, are much ill-used gentlemen. But in Ethiopia, devils were white, so that, while we say "black as the devil," they, with equal propriety, and certainly, to us it appears, with more elegance, say

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as white as the devil"-themselves being black, and that of course being the right colour, they could not do less than dress up their gods in the best manner, and with the choicest material they had; while the unfortunate devils were made not unlike a very ugly, pale, and deformed Englishman, with certain additions, according to the taste of individuals.

A modern writer* of great research, has the following curious ob- 1836 servations relating to Chrishna: "On the colour of the gods of the ancients, and of the identity of them all with the god Sol, and with Mr. Godfrey Higgins. See Anacalypsis v. 1, p. 138-9.

the Chrishna of India, nothing more need be said. The reader has already seen the striking marks of similarity in the history of Chrishna, and the stories related of Jesus in the Romish and Heretical books. He probably will not think that their effect is destroyed, as Mr. Maurice flatters himself, by the word Chrishna, in the Indian language signifying black, and the god being of that colour, when he is informed of what Mr. Maurice was probably ignorant, that in all the Romish countries of Europe, in France, Italy, Germany, &c., the god Christ, as well as his mother, are described in their old paintings and statues to be black. The infant god, in the arms of his black mother, his arms and drapery white, is himself perfectly black. If the reader doubts my word, he may go to the Cathedral at Moulins, to the famous Chapel of the Virgin at Loretto, to the Church of the Annunciator, to the Church of St. Lazaro or the Church of St. Stephen at Genoa, to St. Francisco at Pisa, to the Church at Brixen in the Tyrol, and to that at Padua, to the Church of St. Theodore at Munich, in the two last of which, the whiteness of the eyes and teeth, and the studied redness of the lips are very observable; to the Church and to the Cathedral of Augsburgh, where are a black virgin and child as large as life; to Rome, to the Borghese Chapel Maria Maggiore, to the Pantheon, to a small Chapel of St. Peter's, on the right-hand side on entering, near the door,—and in fact, to almost innumerable other churches in countries professing the Romish religion. There is scarcely an old church in Italy where some remains of the black virgin and black child are not to be met with." The same author observes that "the Romish Chrishna is black in India, black in Europe, and black he must remain, like the ancient gods of Greece, as we have just seen. But, after all, what was he but their Jupiter, the second person of their trinurti, or trinity, the Logos of Parmenides and Plato, an incarnation or emanation of the Solar power!" So much for the black virgin and her black child, formerly worshipped by the dark races of India, and even now adored in our Catholic churches the devotees little dreaming that the black god Chrishna was but a symbol of the Sun, and that the black virgin mother was nothing more than the virgin of the constellations, painted black, because, as before observed, that was the national colour; had the people been green, their gods, angels, and virgin mothers would have been the colour of grass.

The idea of a son born of a virgin-mother, clearly relates to the

Sun, which our readers will at once allow, when they are informed that in ages past, on the 25th of December, precisely at midnight, the celestial sign which appeared above or upon the horizon, and seemed to preside at the opening or commencement of the new solar revolution, was the virgin of the constellations. The Sun was said to be born at the solstice, or the standing still of the Sun in winter, after which it seemed to retake its route towards our hemisphere, and re-unite itself to the virgin at the grand fete of the Assumption, or the re-union of the mother with her son. It is an interesting fact, that the Sun, called sometimes Chrishna, sometimes Atys, sometimes Adonis, and sometimes Christ, appeared in the heavens to pass from the womb of the virgin of the constellations at the very moment that we celebrate his appearance in the world, or his nativity. No fact in history is better established than this-that it was customary, in times past, to represent the Sun under the emblem of a newly-born infant, at the solstice of winter, when the great luminary seemed to have so little force, that it was aptly typified by the weakest of all creatures- -an infant just passed from the womb of its mother. Let our Christian readers bear in mind that the worship of the virgin and her child, was common in the East, ages before the generally received account of Christ's appearance in the flesh; that the god Sun, or of day, was adored under the name of Bacchus in Thrace, Greece, India, Arabia, and Asia Minor; under the name of Osiris in Egypt, of Mithra in Persia, of Adonis in Phenecia and all the ancient authors who treat of these subjects, confess that Bacchus, Adonis, and Osiris are mere symbols of the Sun, under different names, as Pan was a symbol of the Universe!

It is impossible to walk ten yards in Egypt without at once seeing that the genius of its ancient people led them at all times to give an outward and tangible form to their astronomical speculations. Personification of the apparent strength, grandeur, and motion of the heavenly bodies, was the very soul and basis of their theology. The gods of the Egyptian priests were material gods; this is proved by the admirable writings of their poets and philosophers. Thus we find that Sirius, or the dog star, was honoured under the name of Anubis, and in the form of a sacred dog, worshipped in their temples. It was this star that appeared above the horizon just before the periodical inundation of the Nile; and seemed to warn the Egyptians of the approach of the inundation; and as dogs are the most faithful and watchful of all animals, it re

ceived the appellation dog star, or sacred dog. The species of vulture now found in South Africa, the large light-coloured valtur percnopterous, was one of the sacred birds of the Egyptians. The sparrow-hawk was typical of the Sun; the Ibis the Moon; and cats are even now held sacred by that singular people; indeed, so great is their devotion to those creatures, that were even a priest by accident to destroy one of them, it might cost him his life.

In Egypt was erected the famous temple in the town of the Sun, or Heliopolis; wherein was placed a statue of the god of day. We are told it was splendidly ornamented, and represented a beardless young man, with one arm elevated, holding in his hand a whip, in the attitude of the driver of a chariot; in his left was a thunderbolt and a bundle of ears of corn: such was one of the Egyptian symbols of the Sun in their ancient temple.

We learn from Cheremon, and the most learned Egyptian priests, that the ancient priests of their nation admitted no causes nor existences independent of the universe itself; but acknowledged for gods, the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, which composed the zodiac; and all those which by their rising and setting marked the division of the signs; their subdivision into decans, the horoscope, and the Stars which presided over it, which were called chiefs of the sky. They assure us that the Egyptians regarded the Sun as a great God, architect and moderator of the universe; explaining not only the fable of Osiris, but all other religious fables, by the Stars; their motions, their appearance, and disappearance, by the phases of the Moon; the increase or the diminution of her light, by the progressive march of the Sun, by the division of the heavens, and the division of time into two great parts; the one affecting the day, the other the night; finally, by the action of physical causes, which they considered as the sovereign arbiters of human destiny, that they honored by sacrifices, and to which they raised images. Our readers will we trust now understand why it was men became idolators, and worshipped many gods; but they will also not fail to perceive, that to admire the operations of Nature, and to consider it as unique and one, was not idolatry; which can only truly be said to have commenced when men forsook Nature, and blindly adored the lifeless block of wood or stone as a real God; when it was merely a symbol or sign.

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