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was a gospel put into metre; and that nothing but “an evil heart of unbelief" could induce any man to doubt "the certainty of those things wherein he had been instructed." It is probably no more than a figure of speech, though certainly very injudiciously chosen, in which Origen calls the crucifixion of Christ the most awful tragedy that was ever acted.*

But the pretence of the reality of the event would break down, in the judgment of the better-informed, from the total want of evidence to support that part of the detail, which, had it been real, could not have wanted the clearest and most constraining demonstration. The darkness which closed the scene on the suffering Prometheus, was easily exhibited on the stage, by putting out the lamps; but when the tragedy was to become history, and the fiction to be turned into fact, the lamp of day could not be so easily disposed of. Nor can it be denied that the miraculous darkness which the Evangelists so solemnly declare to have attended the crucifixion of Christ, labours under precisely the same fatality of an absolute and total want of evidence.

Gibbon, in his usual strain of sarcasm and irony, keenly asks, "How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? This miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phænomena of natureearthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect; both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phænomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe."-Gibbon, vol. 2, ch. 15, p. 379. This objection of Gibbon is answered by Bishop Wat

His answer to Celsus, chapter 27. What other than this is the sense of those words of the apostolic chief of sinners, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth crucified among you?"-Gal. iii. 1. Surely, it was not in the country of the Galatians that Christ was crucified; nor could he have been set forth before their eyes, and evidently, otherwise than by a picture, or in a theatrical representation!

son, in a double-entendre paragraph, which opens with the curious word to the wise, that "though he was aware he was liable to be misunderstood in what he was going to say, yet Mr. Gibbon would not misunderstand him." Then follows the most extraordinary declaration of his own, (a bishop's) faith, "that however mysterious the darkness at the crucifixion might have been, he had no doubt the power of God was as much concerned in its production, as it was in the opening of the graves, and the resurrection of the dead bodies of the saints that slept, which accompanied that darkness."-Third Letter to Gibbon, last paragraph. Another way of saying, that every sensible man must perceive that one part of the story was just as probable as the other, or that it was a romance altogether. The good Bishop ventured to trust his security to the well-proved truth of the adage, "None are so blind as those who will not see."

The immoral and mischievous tendency of the doctrine of atonement for sin, so acceptable to guilty minds, and so eagerly embraced by the greatest monsters of iniquity, had been preached by self-interested priests, and reprobated by all who wished well to mankind, long before that doctrine was deduced from the Christian Scriptures, long before those Scriptures are pretended to have been written.

Before the period assigned to the birth of Christ, the poet Ovid had assailed the demoralizing delusion with the most powerful shafts of philosophic scorn:

"Cum sis ipse nocens, moritur cur victima pro te ?
Stultitia est morte alterius sperare salutem."

"When thou thyself art guilty, why should a victim die for thee? What folly is it to expect salvation from the death of

another."

No particle of difficulty remains, then, in accounting for the fact, that in that portion of the Acts of the Apostles in which the miraculous style is discontinued, and we so clearly trace the probable and most likely real adventures or journal of a missionary sent out from the college of the Egyptian Therapeuts joined on as an appendix to some fragment of their sacred legends which detailed the mystical adventures of the supposed first founders of their order, whose example the missionary was to have continually before him*,-we should read, that when the

This appendix commences in the 13th chapter, where we find Saul in the mission at Antioch, and preaching again, one of the sermons which had been before ascribed to Peter.

apostolic Therapeut attempted to preach his doctrine of "Jesus Christ and him crucified," at Athens, he found that the Athenians were already in possession of all he had to communicate, and that what he was endeavouring to set off as a doctrine newly revealed, was with them a very old story. He brought to their ears "no new thing." The Epicurean and Stoical philosophers were more at home than himself upon that subject, and called him “a babbler,” the very term that most expressively designates the character of a doting ignoramus, who, in the arrogance of his own conceit, will be for ever foisting up old stories of a hundred thousand years standing, and swearing that they had occurred in his own experience, and had happened to nobody else but some particular acquaintances of his.

The majority, however, carried the vote that he should have a fair hearing, and Paul was allowed to preach in the Areopagus. The previous rebuke he had received had completely subdued his impertinence; he no more presumed to lay claim to originality in the crucifying story. He preached PURE DEISM, quoted their own poets, and ventured not once so much as to name his Jesus, or to make an allusion that could be construed as referring to him rather than to any other of the god-men or man-gods who had risen from the dead as well as he (Acts xvii).

PROMETHEUS, exactly answering to the Christian personification PROVIDENCE, is, like that personification, used sometimes as an epithet synonymous with the Supreme Deity himself. The Pagan phrase, "Thank Prometheus," like the Christian one," Thank Providence," its literal interpretation, meant exactly the same as "Thank God!" Thus in The ORPHIC Hymn to Chronus or Saturn,+ we have this sublime address to the Supreme Deity under his name Prometheus, "Illustrious, cherishing Father, both of the immortal gods and of men, various of counsel, spot

* Acts xvii. 18.

+ See the original in Eschenbachius's edit. p. 110. Compare also my learned and amiable friend's edition in original Greek inscription types, cast at his own expence.

The three similar epithets, "Various of counsel," "Various in design," "Tortuous in counsel," would justify the doctrine, that the whole Trinity was comprehended in this "Prometheus the power of God, and Prometheus the wisdom of God." (1 Cor. i. 24.) "His name shall be called, Wonderful Counsellor, The mighty God." (Isa. ix. 6.) Lactantius admits, that though what the poets delivered concerning the creation of man was corrupted, it was not different in effect from the truth as held by Christians; for in that they have asserted that man was created out of clay by PROMETHEUS, they were not wrong as to the fact, but only as to the name of the Creator.-Lactant. Instit lib. ii. c. 10.-Kortholto Pagano Obtrectatore, Citante p. 34.

less, powerful, mighty Titan, who consumest all things, and again thyself repairest them, who holdest the ineffable bands throughout the boundless world; thou universal parent of successive being, various in design, fructifier of the earth and of the starry heaven, DREAD PROMETHEUS, who dwellest in all parts of the world, author of generation, tortuous in counsel, most excellent, hear our suppliant voice, and send of our life a happy blameless end." Amen!

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.

THE NILE was worshipped as a god by the inhabitants of the countries fertilized by its inundations, before all records of human opinions or actions. Plato, who flourished 348 years before the Christian era, records, that the Egyptian priests had pointed out to him on their pyramids the symbolical hieroglyphics of a religion which had existed in uninterrupted orthodoxy among them for upwards of ten thousand years. Nor has the progress of Christianity or civilization, even at this day, entirely abolished the religious honours paid to this king of streams. The priests called the Cophtes still think that they " sanctify its waters to the mystical washing away of sin," by throwing into it some beads or some bits of a cross; as in our own baptismal service in the church of England at this day, the priest spreads his hand over the font, and uses the words, "Sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin;" and then sprinkling the water so sanctified in the child's face, and making the sign of the cross upon its forehead, he adds, " We do sign him with the sign of the cross," &c.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS ENTIRELY PAGAN.

The holy father Minucius Felix, in his Octavius, written as early as the year 211, indignantly resents the supposition that the sign of the cross should be considered as exclusively a Christian symbol; and represents his advocate of the Christian argument, as retorting on an infidel opponent, "As for the adoration of crosses, which you object against us, I must tell you, that we neither adore crosses

nor desire them; you it is, ye Pagans, who worship wooden gods, who are the most likely people to adore wooden crosses, as being, parts of the same substance with your deities. For what else are your ensigns, flags, and standards, but crosses gilt and beautified. Your victorious trophies not only represent a simple cross, but a cross with a man upon it. The sign of a cross naturally appears in a ship, either when she is under sail, or rowed with expanded oars like the palm of our hands. Not a jugum erected but exhibits the sign of a cross; and when a pure worshipper adores the true God, with hands extended, he makes the same figure. Thus you see that the sign of the cross has either some foundation in nature, or in your own religion, and therefore ought not to be objected against Christians."*

Meagher, a Popish priest, who came over from the Roman Catholic communion, and attached himself (for what reasons, or with what motives, must rest with himself alone) to the ministry of the church of England, furnishes us with a most satisfactory prototype of what he had come at last to consider as a corrupt Christianity, in the idolatrous worship of the Nile. The ignorant gratitude of a superstitious people, while they adored the river on whose inundations the fertility of their provinces depended, could not fail of attaching notions of sanctity and holiness to the posts that were erected along its course, and which, by a transverse beam, indicated the height to which, at the spot where the beam was fixed, the waters might be expected to rise. This cross at once warned the traveller to secure his safety, and formed a standard of the value of the land. Other rivers may add to the fertility of the country through which they pass, but the Nile is the absolute cause of that great fertility of the Lower Egypt, which would be all a desert, as bad as the most sandy parts of Africa, without this river. It supplies it both with soil and moisture, and was therefore gratefully addressed, not merely as an ordinary river-god, but by its express title of the Egyptian Jupiter. The crosses, therefore, along the banks of the river, would naturally share in the honours of the stream, and be the most expressive emblem of good fortune, peace, and plenty. The two ideas could never be separated: the fertilizing flood was

Reeve's Apologies of the Fathers, &c. vol. 1, p. 139. This Reverend Mr. Reeves is unquestionable authority for the text of the orthodox Fathers; in which he could not be wrong. We may be allowed however to question his authority, where he would persuade us that, all the heretics ate children.

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