guage, no words that man could utter, could so distinctly, so expressively say that it was the SUN, and nothing but the Sun, that was so emblemized. And these rays are seen alike surrounding the heads of the Indian CHREESHNA, as he is exhibited in the beautiful plate engraved by Barlow, and inscribed to the Archbishop of Canterbury; round the Grecian Apollo; and in all our pictures of Jesus Christ. Nay, more the epithet THE LORD, as we have seen, was peculiarly and distinctively appropriate to the SUN, and to all personifications of the Sun; so that the SUN and the LORD were perfectly synonymous, and Sun's day and the Lord's day the same to every nation on whom his light hath shone.

As it was especially to the honour of Bacchus, as the SUN, that the mysteries were celebrated, so the bread and wine which the Lord (or Sun) had commanded to be received, was called the Lord's supper. Throughout the whole ceremony, the name of the Lord was many times repeated, and his brightness or glory, not only exhibited to the eye by the rays which surrounded his name, but was made the peculiar theme or subject of their triumphant exultation. Now bring we up our most sacred Christian ordinance ! That also is designated, as the ceremony in honour of Bacchus was, the Lord's supper. In that also all other epithets of the deity so honoured, are merged in the peculiar appropriation of the term THE LORD. It would sound irreverently, even in Christian ears, to call it Jesus's supper, or Jesus's table; it is always termed the Lord's. And as in the Lord's supper of the ancient idolators at Eleusis, it was the benefit which they received from the sun's rays or glory that were commemorated, so in our Christian orgies, it is the glory or brightness of the same deity which is peculiarly symbolized and honoured. A poor Jewish peasant never was, nor could have been called the LORD. Let us take words according to the meaning of words, and not suffer our reason to be sophisticated by mere sounds, which have in themselves no meaning at all, and we shall see that our English word GLORY is but a ridiculously sonorous mouthing of its original, CLARY. The exact meaning of clary is brightness; the attribute of brightness is peculiarly characteristic of the SUN use only the meaning of the word, instead of its unmeaning sound, wherever it occurs, and the heliolatrous sense and origination of our Christian Communion Service, and its absolute identity with the Pagan myste

ries of Eleusis, can no longer evade detection; for thus run the Eleusinian and the Christian mysteries, like linked horses in a chariot, step for step, and phrase for phrase, together.

THE DOXOLOGY.

ic Brightness be to God on high! We praise thee, we brighten thee (that is, we say that thou art bright), we give thee thanks for thy great brightness. Heaven and earth are full of thy brightness. Brightness be to thee,

O Lord (that is, O Sun) most high !"

Is not this the real, the only sense, of both mysteries? If it be not, our ignorance has, at least, one consolation : we shall not have to quarrel with any body who can tell us what is! Safe enough are we from any thing like an idea on the part of the partakers of those holy mysteries: a sensible person who had received the sacrament, might be shown for a week afterwards at the menagerie.

PAGAN MYTHOLOGY

Compared.

more

1. Titan, the eldest of the children of heaven, yielded to Saturn the kingdom of the world, provided he raised no children; but on the birth of Jupiter, he rebelled, and raising war in heaven, prevailed not, neither was his place found any more in heaven. He and all his host of rebel angels were cast out, and imprisoned under mountains heaped upon them. Their vain attempts to rise is the supposed cause of earthquakes and volcanoes.

"Or from our sacred hill, with fury thrown,

Deep in the dark Tartarean gulph shall groan." Jupiter's threat to the inferior gods,

Iliad, 6. Pope's Version. 2. Latona was driven out of heaven, and having been got with child by Jupiter, without knowledge of a man, she brought forth her son, our Lord and Saviour Phoebus-Apollo, "the

CHRISTIAN REVELATION.

1: Satan, the eldest of the children of heaven, yielded to Jehovah the kingdom of the world, provided he raised no more children; but on the birth of Messiah, he rebelled, and raising war in heaven, vailed not, neither was his place found any more in heaven," (Rev. xii. 8.) "And the an

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gels which kept not their first estate, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day."-Jude 6.

"God spared not the angels to Hell."-2 Pet. ii. 4. that sinned, but cast them down Note well! the original word signifies TARTARUS.

2. Eve was driven out of Paradise, and in her representative Mary, "seeing she knew not a man," brought forth her son, our Lord Jesus Christ, "being the brightness of his glory, and

*The editors of the Unitarian New Version of the New Testament, who very modestly wish to shovel all these spurcities and salacities out of the sacred text, have the impudence to tell us, in a note, that they were interpolated to lessen the odium attached to Christianity, from its founder being a crucified Jew, and to elevate him to the dignity of the heroes and demi-gods of the heathen mythology. So then, the argument of the primitive Christians with their Pagan opponents was good-natured enough-If you won't adopt our religion,—why, we'll adopt yours.

PAGAN MYTHOLOGY

Compared.

CHRISTIAN REVELATION

9. The ancient Gauls had an 9. The difference between idol, under the name HESUS, Hesus and Jesus is but a breath. who, the mythologists say, an"The Lord of Hosts, he is swered to the Roman Mars, or the King of Glory."-Psalm Lord of Hosts, to whom they xxiv. 10. used to sacrifice their captives taken in war; of whom Lucan, book 1, line 445.

Horrensque feris altaribus HESUS !

Hesus, with cruel altars, horrid god!

"Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ!"-Te Deum, 14.

"Thou shalt bruise them with a rod of iron, and break them in pieces, like a potter's vessel.". Psalm ii. 9.

"And he was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood."-Rev. xix. 13.

"Thus have I attempted to trace, with a confidence continually increasing as I advanced, a parallel between the gods adored in Greece, Italy, and India; but which was the original system, and which the copy, I will not presume to decide. I am persuaded, however, that a connection existed between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy, long before the birth of Moses."

So concludes the pious Sir William Jones, Asiatic Researches, vol. 1, p. 271. The reader is to conclude as he pleases.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

PYTHAGORAS, B. c. 586.

Hav

As all ideas of man are derived from his senses, and consequently may be traced to their origination from that their only source, the gods and goddesses, or any god that conceit could form to itself, would still admit of being referred to its primordial type in something the like of which experience had first been impressed on the senses. ing found innumerable pre-existent models of the imaginary supernatural character of Christ. we discover in the Samian sage every thing that could have furnished forth the calmer and more philosophic personification of Unitarian Christianity, the mere man Jesus.

Pythagoras, as his name signifies, had been born under precisely the circumstances ascribed to Jesus Christ; having been the object of a splendid dispensation of pro

phecy, and had his birth foretold by Apollo Pythus; his soul having descended from its primæval state of companionship with the divine Apollo, "the glory which he had with the father before the world was."—John vii. 5.

Divesting his story, however, of the supernatural superstructure that could be as easily pretended for any one extraordinary character as for any other; it remains historically certain, that this first of philosophers, and most distinguished individual of the human race, was a real character, and was born at Samos, in Greece, (from whence his epithet, the Samian sage,) in the third year of the 48th Olympiad—that is, 586 years before the epocha of the pretended birth of his Galilean rival. He was educated under Pherecydes, of Syrus, of whom Cicero speaks, as the first who inculcated the doctrine of the distinct existence and immortality of the soul; and afterwards became the distinguished pupil of the priests of Egypt.The limits of this work admit not of our dwelling on any further particulars of his history, than those in which he presents the most clear and unquestionable type of the character afterwards set forth to the world under the prosopopeia generally designated as Jesus Christ.

Pythagoras is most characteristically associated with the doctrine which he taught, and which takes its name from him, the Pythagorean Metempsychosis.* After his master had broached the notion of the existence and immortality of souls, it was but a second and a necessary step, to find some employment for them; and that of their eternal migration from one body to another, after every effort that imagination can make, will be found at least as consistent with reason as that of their existence at all, and that in which the mind, after all its plunges into the vast unknown, must ultimately acquiesce.†

"Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,

Through what new scenes and changes must we pass !
The wide, th' unbounded prospect lies before us;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it!
Addison's Cato.

Pythagoras, however, left behind him more substantial evidence of real wisdom, and of actual benefits conferred

* Meteμyvxwots, the transmigration of the soul out of one body into another, from ueta and yun, the life, the breath, the wit, the soul, the je-ne-sais-quoi. t The Metempsychosis overthrows the doctrine of the everlasting torments of hell-fire; and, on that account, is less congenial to Christian dispositions.