convinced by degrees, and informed of the whole truth, by the suggestions of the Holy Spirit, should be content to submit in earnest to the yoke of Christ.* The reader will do himself the justice of collating this admission with the same accommodating policy of St. Gregory, adduced in our Chapter of Admissions, p. 48. SAINTS AND MARTYRS THAT NEVER EXISTED. The last of ten thousand features of resemblance between Paganism and Christianity, which might be adduced to establish their absolute identity, which we shall care to notice, is the striking coincidence that the Christian personages, like the Pagan deities, were frequently created by errors of language, mistakes of noun substantives for proper names, ignorance of the sense of abbreviated words, substitution of one letter for another, &c. &c. so that words which had only stood for a picture, a cloak, a high-road, a ship, a tree, &c. in their original use, were passed over in another language as names of gods, heroes, saints, and martyrs, when no such persons had ever existed. Thus have we a Christian church erected to Saint Amphibolus, another to Saint VIAR-Christian prayers addressed to the holy martyr Saint Veronica; and Chrestus adored as a god, by the ignorance that was not aware that Amphibolus was Greek for a cloak; Viar. abbreviated Latin for a perfectus Viarum, or overseer of the highways; Vera Icon, half Latin and half Greek for true image; and Chrestust the Greek in Roman letters for any good and useful man or thing. * Ac maximi subinde pontifices quam plurima prima quidem facie dissimulanda duxere, optimum scilicet rati tempori deferendum esse; suadebant quippe sibi, haud ullam adversus gentilitios ritus vim, utpote qui mordicus a fidelibus retinebantur, adhibendam esse; neque ullatenus enitendum, ut quicquid profanos saperet mores, omnino tolleretur, quinimo quam maxima utendum lenitate, sacrarumque legum ex parte intermittendum imperium arbitrabantur.-Tom. 1, lib. 1, c. 21. + This mistake originates in what is called the "Iotacism, which consists in pronouncing the like L 17. The modern Greeks give them both the sound of the Italian I or English E. This prevailed much in Egypt, and hence is frequently seen to take place in the Alexandrine MSS. Hence also Xotoros and Xonotos have been confounded; and Suetonius has written, "Judæos impulsore CHRESTO assiduè tumultuantes Româ expulit."-Elsley's Annotations on the Gospels, vol. 1, p. xxzZ. But surely this will read quite as well if taken exactly the other way. It was as easy for the Christian-evidence manufacturers to change E into I, as for Suetonius to have changed I into E. Notwithstanding the idiot's dream of an imaginary preProtestant state of Christianity, or of Christianity in its primitive purity, ere what are called the corruptions of the Romish church had mingled with and defiled the stream, our Protestant historians are not able to make good their evidence of the existence of Christianity, in any time or place, in separation from the most exceptionable of those corruptions. Never was there the day or the hour in which Christianity was, and its corruptions were not. The thing of supposable rational evidence, historical fact, sublime doctrines, moral precepts, and practical utility, which we hear of in the coxcomb-divinity of an Unitarian chapel, is a perfect ens rationis, the beau ideal of conceit, that never had its type in history. Though the most accurate calculations satisfactorily prove that not more than a twentieth part of the Roman empire had embraced the Christian name before the conversion of Constantine, yet on the occasion of that prince's death, his historian, Eusebius,* tells us of masses which were celebrated, and prayers which were said for his soul in the Apostle's church, as a thing of course, and in a way in which it was impossible that such performance of mass and prayers for the dead could have been spoken of, had there been any contrary doctrine or practice known to Christ's church, of higher antiquity or of better sanction than they. CHAPTER XXXVI. SPECIMENS OF PAGAN PIETY. Προθυραία. "THE first of the Orphict Hymns is addressed to the goddess Пovara, or the Door-keeper, and as it is perhaps the most ancient monument extant of the adoration paid to the deity who was supposed to preside over child-births, and whom the Romans afterwards called Juno Lucina, or Diana Lucina," I present the reader with a literal translation of it, which I find ready made to my hand, in Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon : * Euseb. Hist. of Constantine, book 4, ch. 71. "To PROTHYREA, the Incense, STORAX. "Hear me, O venerable goddess, demon with many names,* aid in travail, sweet hope of child-bed women, SAVIOUR of females, kind friend to infants, speedy deliverer, propitious to youthful nymphs, Prothyræa! Key-bearer, gracious nourisher, gentle to all, who dwellest in the houses of all, delightest in banquets! Zone-looser, secret, but in thy works to all apparent! Thou sympathisest with throes, but rejoicest in easy labours; Ilithyria, in dire extremities, putting an end to pangs; thee alone parturient women invoke, rest of their souls, for in thy power are those throes that end their anguish, Artemis, llythyria, reverend Prothyraa. Hear, immortal dame, and grant us offspring by thy aid, and save us, as thou hast always been the SAVIOUR of all !"-Lexicon, under the word phato bring forth or be delivered.† A free poetical version of an hymn to Diana, expressive of her attributes, as generally believed and worshipped about the time of St. Paul, to the measure of the Sicilan Mariner's Hymn : "Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”—Acts xix. 34. "Great Diana! huntress queen! Thou art holy! thou alone, Thou, of earth and heav'n the queen! They to thee who worship pay, And from fatal sins secure; * And what was to hinder the blessed Virgin Mary from being one of the names of this demon? Godfrey Higgins, Esq. in his most instructive and interesting History of the Celtic Druids, published A. D. 1827, states that he counted upwards of forty different names under the image of the Virgin at Loretto.-p. 109. †The reader will observe, that as the distinguishing attributes of the Pagan divinities were represented in their statues, it was absolutely impossible that this Divine Virgin, kind friend to infants, could be symbolized otherwise than as with a child in her arms. But such a representation could not possibly symbolize or distinguish the mother of Jesus from any other mother! Peace of mind 'tis their's to know, O bright goddess! once again But if long contempt of thee Thy adoring vot❜ry, I In thy faith will live and die; I no fear of death shall know, Land me on th' Elysian shore, Life's eternal blest abode, Where is virtue, where is God." First published in the Author's Clerical Review, in Ireland. THE PRAYER OF SIMPLICIUS. There is a most beautiful prayer of the Pagan Simplicius, generally given at the end of Epictetus's Enchiridion, and almost the model of that used in our Communion Service, "O Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known," &c. The ideas are precisely the same; the words and the machinery alone are a little varied. I find a readymade poetical version of this, in Johnson's Rambler. "O thou, whose pow'r o'er moving worlds presides, On darkling man in pure effulgence shine, And cheer the clouded mind with light divine. 'Tis thine alone, to calm the pious breast With silent confidence and holy rest. From thee, great Jove! we spring, to thee we tend, "There is one God, and there is none other but he."—Mark xii. 32. "God is neither the object of sense, nor subject to passion, but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent. In his body he is like the light, and in his soul he resembles truth. He is the universal spirit that pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings receive their life from him. There is but One only God!! who is not, as some are apt to imagine, seated above the world beyond the orb of the universe ;* but being himself all in all, he sees all the beings that fill his immensity, the only principle, the light of heaven, the Father of all. He produces every thing, he orders and disposes every thing; he is the reason, the life, and the motion of all beings."-Dr. Collyer's Lectures, quoted by G. Higgins, Esq. Celtic Druids, 4to. p. 126. Mr. Higgins, adducing this bit of Paganism, exclaims, "How beautiful!" But surely, he would not think of putting these unsanctified notions of the deity on a footing with the sublime description of the evangelical poet Dr. Watts, who, knowing so much more about God than Pythagoras did, tells us, His nostrils breathe out fiery streams, His jealous eyes his wrath inflame, And raise his vengeance high'r! !" Watt's Hymns, book 1, hymn 42. The consolations and advantages which the Christian derives from the blessed light of the Gospel, may be best appreciated by thus comparing them with the darkness of Paganism: "So lies the snow upon a raven's back!" THE GOLDEN VERSES OF PYTHAGORAS. Of these, I supply a free poetical version, by the father of the late Mr. John Adams, of Edmonton, to whom I *This sentiment of Pythagoras, so many years before the Christian era, is evidently the correction of some grosser form of demonolatry, which had prevailed in the heathen world before the time of Pythagoras, and which had been expressed in such words as " Our Father, which art in heaven, &c. |