author could adduce, was, that the ointment with which the Pagan priests anointed the lips of the mystics, or initiated in the Adonia, or sacrament of our Lord Adonis, was wholly different from the unguentum immortale which God the Father gave to his only Son,* and which the Son bestows on all those who believe in the divine majesty of his name: for Christ's ointment, he would have us to know, is "of an immortal composition, and mixed up with the spiritual scents of paints, of myrrh, aloes, and cassia, out of ivory palaces;" whereas the Pagan ointment was, I dare say, little better than cart-grease.-Nobody need know any more about Vir. Clarus Julius Firmicus Maternus. The ADONIA were solemn feasts in honour of Venus, and in memory of her beloved son, Adonis. Venus, as sprung from the sea, Mare, could not be more honourably distinguished than by her epithet Maria; Adonai is literally Our Lord: so that these solemn feasts, without any change or substitution of names, were unquestionably celebrated to the honour of MARY and her son, OUR LORD; to whomsoever else those names may have in later ages been applied. They were observed by the Greeks, Phoenicians, Lycians, Syrians, Egyptians, and indeed by almost all the nations of the then known world. It is universally agreed, that it is to these ceremonies that the Jewish God refers in the 8th chapter of Ezekiel, where they are denounced as an abomination; we find by inference, an honourable apology for the Jewish nation, who, as a people, have through so many ages, refused to embrace a religion, which in so many particulars, and even in the continuance of the same names, has lost all possibility of being distinguished in their apprehension from "the abomination of the Sidonians." The festival of the Adonia was still observed at Alexandria, the cradle of the Christian religion, in the time of St. Cyril; and at that Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians, (Acts xi. 26,) even as late as the time of the emperor Julian, commonly called the Apostate; "whose arrival there during the solemnity was taken for an ill omen."-Bell's Pantheon. This is surely a curious admission of our Christian mythologists. Let the reader ask himself, and answer as he may the questions emer *Aliud est unguentum quod Deus pater unico tradidit filio, &c. p. 46.-See in its place, under the name Christ, what serious though slippery, arguments the Fathers build on ointment or pomatum. gent from this state of the Christian evidences-1. What argument can be drawn from the wonderful propagation of the Gospel, when in the city where it was at first most successfully preached, and where the disciples were first called Christians, it had not, even in the fourth century, abolished the Pagan and idolatrous festival of the Adonia?-2. And wherefore should the arrival of the emperor Julian (a known apostate from the Christian religion, and a zealous patron of Paganism), during the celebration of the Adonia, have been considered as an ill omen, but that the Adonia had come to be considered as entirely a Christian festival?-3. And at what time, or whether ever, the festival of the Adonia was distinctly abolished, and that of the Christian Easter established upon its overthrow? For the solution of these most important inquiries, we hold up the light of the admissions of ecclesiastical historians. It must ever be borne in mind, that the Christians of the second, third, and fourth centuries industriously laboured to give their religion the nearest possible resemblance to the ancient Paganism; and confessedly adopted the liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and terms of heathenism; making it their boast that the Pagan religion, properly explained, really was nothing else than Christianity; that the best and wisest of its professors in all ages had been Christians all along; that Christianity was but a name more recently acquired to a religion which had previously existed, and had been known to the Greek philosophers, to Plato, Socrates, and Heraclitus; and that "if the writings of Cicero had been read as they ought to have been, there would have been no occasion for the Christian Scriptures." Nor did some of them, who maintained that Jesus Christ had a real existence, hesitate to ascribe to him a work in which "he himself expressly declared that he was in no way opposed to the worship of the gods and goddesses;"* while our most orthodox Christian divines, the best learned in ecclesiastical antiquity, and most entirely persuaded of the truth of the Christian religion, unable to resist or to conflict with the constraining demonstration of the data that prove the absolute sameness and identity of Paganism and Christianity; and unable to point out so much as one single idea or notion, of which they could show that it was peculiar to Christianity, or See the Chapter of Admissions in this DIEGESIS; and Jones on the Canon, vol. I. p. 12. that Christianity had it, and Paganism had it not; have invented the apology of an hypothesis; that thePagan religion, like the Jewish dispensation, was typical; and that Hercules, Adonis, &c. were all of them types and forerunners of the true and real Hercules, Adonis, &c. our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Nothing is more easily conceivable, than that the priests and devotees of any one of the innumerable forms of absurdity which superstition might from time to time assume, should decry all others, and pretend that their's alone was divine: nothing is so hard to be conceived, as that a God of infinite wisdom and truth should be the author of a religion so little superior, and so closely resembling the devices of juggling priests and self-interested impostors, that it should not be in the power of any man on earth, who would judge impartially, to discover in what the superiority consists; or that there was really any difference at all between them. CHAPTER XXIII. THE MYSTICAL SACRIFICE OF THE PHOENICIANS. "IT was an established custom among the ancient Phoenicians, on any calamitous or dangerous emergency, for the ruler of the state to offer up, in prevention of the general ruin, the most dearly-beloved of his children, as a ransom to divert the divine vengeance. They who were devoted for this purpose, were offered mystically, in consequence of an example which had been set this people by the god Kronus, who, in a time of distress, offered up his only son to his father Ouranus. The mystical sacrifice of the Phoenicians had these requisites: 1st. That a prince was to offer it; 2nd. That his only son was to be the victim; 3rd. That he was to make this grand sacrifice invested with the emblems of royalty."-Bryant's Observations on Ancient History, quoted in Archbishop Magee's Work on the Atonement, vol. 1, p. 388. This is the Archbishop of Dublin, whose spirit, temper, and conduct are so strikingly in harmony with those he ascribes to a God delighting in blood and bloody sacrifices, famous for his inexorable severity in the government of his diocese, and his cruel treatment of the inferior clergy; nor less distinguished for the convenient flexibility of his own orthodoxy. He is known in private to laugh at the folly of his own doctrines, as in public he ventured to declare, that though he believed in the Articles of the Church of England collectively, he did not believe in them separately. Here is, in fact, a first draft of the whole Christian scheme, existing in a country neighbouring on Judea, many hundreds of years before it became moulded into its present shape. Jesus Christ, the son of a king, is offered by God to himself, to avert his own vengeance, and this is repeatedly called the mystery of the Gospel, (Col. i. 26). Had the Gospel been matter of fact, there could have been no mystery in it. "And they put on him a scarlet robe." "And they clothed him with purple." "And arrayed him in a gorgeous robe." "And they put on him a purple robe." Matt. xxvii. 28. And set up over his head, his accusation, written- "THE KING OF THE JEWS." "THIS IS The King of THE JEWS." "JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE King OF THE JEWS." Matt. xxvii. 37. Luke xxiii. 38. John xix. 19. Such a mockery of a dying malefactor, never in any other instance, disgraced the judicial administration of a Roman magistrate. The addition of the important words, Jesus of Nazareth, in the later Gospel of St. John, strongly indicates the intention of making the circumstances of a previously existing gospel apply to a newly-invented name for the old hero. CHAPTER XXIV. CHRISHNA. "THAT the name of CHRISHNA, and the general outline of his story," says the pious and learned Sir William Jones, "were long anterior to the birth of our Saviour, and probably to the time of Homer, we know very certainly."Asiatic Researches, vol. 1, p. 259. "In the Sanscrit Dictionary, compiled more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole story of the incarnate deity born of a virgin, and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country."Ibid. pp. 259, 260. 267. 272, 273. "I am persuaded," continues this great author, than whom higher authority cannot be adduced-"I am persuaded, that a connection existed between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy, long before the time of Moses."-Ibid. p. 259. "Very respectable natives have assured me, that one or two missionaries have been absurd enough in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to urge, that the Hindus were even now almost Christians; because their Brahma, Vishnou and Mahesa, were no other than the Christian Trinity: a sentence, in which we can only doubt whether folly, ignorance, or impiety, predominates. The Indian triad, and that of Plato, which he calls the Supreme Good, the Reason, and the Soul, are infinitely removed from the holiness and sublimity of the doctrine which pious Christians have deduced from texts in the Gospel.”— Ibid. p. 272. The celebrated poem Bhagavat, contains a prolix account of the life of Chrishna :-" Chrishna, the incarnate deity of the Sanscrit romance, continues to this hour the darling god of the Indian women. The sect of Hindus, who adore him with enthusiastic and almost exclusive devotion, have broached a doctrine which they maintain with eagerness, that he was distinct from all the avatars (or prophets), who had only a portion of his divinity, whereas Chrishna was the person of Vishnou (God) himself in a human form."*-Ibid. p. 260. Chrishna was believed to have been born from the left intercostal rib of a virgin of the royal line of Devaci. "He passed a life of a most extraordinary and incomprehensible nature. His birth was concealed, through fear of the tyrant Cansa, to whom it had been predicted that one born at that time, in that family, would destroy him."-Ibid. p. 259. "He was fostered, therefore, in Mathura, by an honest *For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily."-2 Colossians, 9. |