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nourished by the occean; the brilliant stars, the immense vault of the heavens; and the gods that from it spring; the sea, the rivers," &c.

Even in the comparatively modern theology of the Greeks, who stole, without acknowledgment, the gods of Phenecia and of Egypt, and who were themselves so largely plundered in turn, by the first Christians, we find that the parts of the universe—the various arts, and the divers works, were divided among a crowd of deities. Jupiter was master of the heavens, yet submitted, as all the other gods, to fate or destiny, Pan's fatal sisters. Pluto presided over the lower regions, or hell; which meant, in former times, a place for the dead; but since the introduction of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the opinions which grew out of that doctrine, the word hell has been wrested from its true signification, and, from being a place for the dead, religious imposture has made of it-a place for the damned!-a fiery bottomless pit-to the bottom of which, nevertheless, we are told, the devil lies chained!! Who has not read of the angry god Neptune, and his trident, stirring up by his will, the waves of the mighty ocean? Vulcan was the god of fire, to whom the works of the voluptuary arts are attributed. He was also the husband of Venus, or goddes of love, which seems to intimate, that luxury and a certain kind of that passion, are wedded to each other. Diana presided over the chace, Ceres was the goddess of harvest, Bacchus was the god of wine, and protected the vintage, while Minerva, the genius of wisdom, taught the arts, and how to excel in the production of various fabrics. Every fountain had its Naiads, the mountains their Oreades, the forests their Dryades, and Hamadryades. In the Greek Pantheistical system, all was personified; not merely had the parts of the universe, and the universe considered in its totality, a living, moving representation, or protecting genius, but even abstractions were personified. To symbolize the Sun, under the form of the robust Hercules, or the Moon by the beautiful Isis, was not all; but wisdom, folly, rage, and lust, were typified. That Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, has been already noted. Jupiter and his thunderbolts convey an idea of power. Pandora was a highly poetic personification of the evils and the pleasures, the miseries and the happiness, that the arts of civil life introduce.

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EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

AS A HUMAN BEING,

DISPROVED!

BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE, IN A SERIES OF LETTERS,

FROM A GERMAN JEW,

ADDRESSED TO CHRISTIANS OF ALL DENOMINATIONS.

LETTER 9.

WEEKLY.

ONE PENNY

66

I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel. Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and besides me there is no Saviour."-ISAIAH XLIII. 3, 10, 11.

The simple believeth every word; but the prudent man looketh well to his going."-PROV. XIV. 15.

CHRISTIANS,

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That singular people, the Chinese, worshipped the Sky, the Earth, and the elements, which they considered as parts of one grand whole, one intelligent being, that they called Tangki : the Chinese rendered up their offerings and prayers at the two solstices. Of the Japanese the same may be said, as

stars were animated by intelligences or by ey believed that the

Gods.

They have even now a most splendid temple consecrated to the Sun, and they celebrate the fête of the Moon on the 7th of September.

The Talapoins, or the priests of Siam, ave the greatest veneration for all the elements and the parts they called sacred of nature; and that the ancient Indians worshipped like the Persians a sacred fire, is well known to all readers. This sacred fire was produced by drawing the Sun's rays into one focus upon the summit of a stupendous mountain, regarded by them as the central point of India; and so great was their veneration for the Sun-so heart-felt their admiration that according to Lucian, they never rendered homage to the morning star of day without turning themselves to

wards the East, and preserving the most profound silence; they also formed a kind of dance in imitation of the apparent motion of the brilliant luminary.

The superstitious respect paid by the Hindoos to the river Ganges, is matter of notoriety, and annually hundreds of miserable fanatics commit suicide by burying themselves beneath its waters-believing that river to be a powerful divinity; these victims of error and delusion thus dispose of their wretched lives.

What the Ganges was, and, indeed is, to the Hindoos, the Nile was to the Egyptians, for these latter worshipped that river, the source of which was so ardently and anxiously sought after, by enterprising travellers, as a God, or one of the beneficient intelligent causes of nature. Juvenal states that the Egyptians worshipped plants and onions, which, assertion has been doubted by Millot, without, as it appears to us, sufficient reason; for, as to the ridiculousness of such a deification, it is really no more absurd to worship plants and onions as deities, than to offer up prayers and sacrifices to the river Nile, which it is past doubt that the Egyptians did. There were altars and temples consecrated to its worship at Nilopolis or town of the Nile, with a college of priests attached thereto, who, like the generality of their order, turned the folly and credulity of the people to account, by swelling their own revenues at the expense of the pockets of their dupes.

The periodical inundation of the Nile is, indeed, a most extraordinary phenomenon, and as Egypt would have been one of the most sterile and barren of countries but for such inundations, it is easy to understand why that noble river should have been devoutly worshipped by the Egyptians,--for though they had a strange antipathy to the sea, and, indeed, water of any kind, yet they sincerely adored the river Nile, because, by its overflowings, their dry and arid lands were moistened and converted into the richest of soils; and the Egyptians, like other men, love exceedingly that which benefits and gives them pleasure, and have a full measure of hate for all those things which mar their happiness.

The water of the Ganges was a source of innumerable blessings to the Hindoos; hence it was esteemed divine; they also worshipped the Sun as a great divinity: this we have on the authority of Clement of Alexandria. All the Indians, even the spiritualists, revered those magnificent flambeaux of nature-the Sun and the

Moon, that they sometimes called the two eyes of the Deity. Every year a fête was celebrated in honour of the Sun, on the 9th of January. They also admitted five elements, to which they have erected five Pagodas. The Bramins of the present day tend a sacred fire, drawn from the Sun, upon the mountain called Sirounamaly, for which fire they have the most profound veneration; nor do they ever suffer it to become extinguished. We have good reason to believe that the fires at this day tended by the priests of India, have been kept alive through countless centuries.

Enough has been said to shew that the worship of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the elements, in short, of Nature, as a whole, and in its parts, was the basis of the religions of Asia. We might fill a volume with additional evidence, but however desirable this may be thought by a certain class of readers, such an extensive review would too far swell the bulk of this little work, and defeat the object we have in view-which is, to give an epitome of ancient superstitions as they existed in the different quarters of the globe, with a view to prepare the mind of our readers for the great truth-that the Christian religion was borrowed from the religions of the East! which were themselves based upon the worship of the Universe and its parts. Religious opinions have travelled from East to West-civilization has travelled with them, and materially modified them, but their grand features are still the same.

We have seen that the ancient Greeks, according to the divine Plato, had no other gods than those adored by the barbarians -as the Greeks used to call them-of other nations, and these gods were the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the Earth. The choir in the Edipus of Sophocles invoked the Sun as being the first of all the gods, and their chief. The Earth was adored in the island of Cos, and a temple was erected for its worship at Athens and Sparta, its altar and its oracle were at Olympia. The oracle of Delphi was originally consecrated to it. Pausanius, an author of much reputation, has given a description of Greece, and its religious monuments, in every page of which may be seen traces of nature and its worship,-every where we read of altars, of temples, of statues, consecrated to the Sun, the Moon, the Pleiades, the Goat, the Bear, also to night, to the seas, lakes, rivers, &c.

In Laconia might be seen seven columns raised to the seven planets. The Sun had his statue and the Moon her fountain in

the same country, and the inhabitants of Megalopolis sacrificed to the elements, particularly to the air. To the north wind they had consecrated a temple and built a sacred wood.

The Macedonians adored Estia, or fire, and addressed prayers to Beda, or the element of water. The celebrated Alexander, king of Macedonia, sacrificed to the Sun, to the Moon, and to the Earth. Homer gives the epithet of sacred to several rivers. Nestor and his companions sacrifice a bull to the river Achelous. Achilles invokes the north winds and the sweet zephyrs. The Greeks considered rivers as sacred and divine, as well because of the perpetuity or unchangeableness of their courses, as because they seemed to infuse strength and nutriment into vegetables, watered the plants, and allayed the thirst of animals; and probably, because water is one of the first principles of nature-one of the most powerful agents of the universal force, or great Being.

In Thessaly the people honoured and nourished the sacred raven, in honour of the Sun. A representation of that bird may be seen at this day upon the religious monuments of Mithra, in Persia. In Rome and Italy there are innumerable monuments of the worship rendered to Nature and its principal agents. All the world has heard of the famous temple of Tellus, or the Earth, which served for the assemblies of the senate. In Latium was a fountain consecrated to the Sun, by the side of which were raised two altars, upon which Eneas sacrificed when he arrived in Italy; and we are told, that Romulus instituted certain games called games of the circus, in honour of that Star, which measures the year in its course, and the four elements, which it unceasingly modifies by its powerful action. The Emperor Aurelian built at Rome a temple to the star of the day, that he enriched with gold and precious stones, and Augustus, before him, had caused the images of the Sun and of the Moon to be taken from Egypt and carried before him to Rome in his great triumph over Anthony and Cleopatra.

The

In the history of Sicily we read of oxen consecrated to the Sun; and the island itself was once called the Island of the Sun. oxen which devoured Ulysses and his companions, when touching upon that place, were consecrated to that star. In Crete and in Spain the same worship was formerly found; in the latter country special honour was given to the star of the morning and twilight.

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