the seventh month of an unjust captivity incurred by the conscientious and honourable maintenance of my sincere convictions, informs me, that during his own long residence in Malta, and constant course of commercial transactions with the professors of the Mahomedan creed, he never heard of an unpaid debt, or a violated obligation; and that it is an usual mode of traffic in the market-towns throughout Turkey, for the farmers and huxters to leave their fowls, eggs and butter, &c. in baskets, with the prices affixed, and to return in the evening in perfect security of finding the article as they left it, or the exact price deposited in the place of just so much of it as had found a purchaser. "Were a wise man," says Bishop Kidder, "to choose his religion by the lives of those who profess it, perhaps Christianity would be the last religion he would choose." Christianity, then, has no pretence to evidence on the score of any moral effects it has produced in the world. CHAPTER XXII. ADONIS-JESUS CHRIST. THE Jews had a superstition of not uttering the incommunicable name of God, that is, Yahou, or Jackhou; or, as it frequently occurs, in one syllable -Jao, or Jack ;* which, with more reverence than reason, is pronounced Jah! as the tetragrammaton, or word of four letters, which at this day adorns our Christian temples is called Jehovah. From this divine name, says Parkhurst, the ancient Greeks had their In in their invocations of the gods, more particularly of their god Apollo, i. e. The Light. And hence these two letters, forming the name Jah, written after the oriental manner from right to left, were inscribed over the great door of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. is several times joined with the name, which seems to indicate that they are distinct names for the same deity, and not the one the *The nearest approach to the exact pronunciation of this sacred word will be produced by suspending the action of all the organs of articulation, and making only that convulsive heave of the larynx, by which the bronchal vessels discharge the accumulated phlegm; it is enunciated with the most eloquent propriety in the act of vomiting, and perhaps on this account has been called the unutterable name. Consult Rabbi Ben Herschel, and his beard! The God JEHOVAH, the most hideous of the whole mythology, was well known to the Gentiles; he was the JONN of the ancient Tuscans, and Latinized into the JANUS of the Romans. mere abbreviation of the other. The rays of light or glory within a circle or ring, of which the tetragrammaton, or four-lettered word, is exhibited in our Christian temples, are a demonstration that the same deity is intended by the Christian Jehovah as by the Pagan Jah (that is, Apollo), whose name of two letters was in like manner encircled with rays of glory. The Pagans, indeed, seem more rigidly to have adhered to the text or injunctions of those Syrio-Phoenician odes which have been consecrated by Christian Piety, under the name of the Psalms of David, and which formed a material part of their idolatrous liturgies, than their Christian plagiarists, who have retained the use of them in a never-interrupted succession from their times. We read in the original, the hundred times repeated commands, ♫ 157—Ellell-lu-iah! praise ye Jack! Behold! bless ye Jack! שירו לאלהים זמרו שמו סלו לרכב בערבות ביה שמו ועלזו לפניו כי ארך אפים יחוה כי לעולם תסרו Sing ye to the gods! Chant ye his name! Exalt him who rideth in the heavens, by his name Jack, and leap for joy before his face! For the Lord hath a long nose, and his mercy endureth for ever. It is admitted, however, on all hands, that the proper pronunciation of the tetragrammaton which we call Jehovah, and its synonyme Jah, is entirely lost. Nor can it be denied, that the Hebrew points ordinarily annexed to the consonants of those words, are not the natural points belonging thereto, nor indicative of pronunciation; but are the vowel points belonging to the words ADONAI and Elohim,-to warn the reader, that instead of the word JEHOVAH, which the Jews were forbidden to pronounce, and the pronunciation of which had been long unknown to them, they are always to read Adonai or Adonis.* Hence we find that frequently where the common printed copies read, many of Dr. Kennicott's codices have And hence, says Dr. Parkhurst, whose orthodoxy of Christian faith admits not a suspicion-hence the idol Adonis had his namet The reader will I hope, do himself the justice to observe, that throughout this DIEGESIS, no merely fanciful or conjectural interpre See the Oxford Encyclopædia, under the head Adonists; and my own further investigations of this curious subject, in my Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian religion, published during the earlier months of my still-continuing unjust imprisonment, for the conscientious exposure of the errors and ignorance on which that religion is founded, p. 96. ↑ Parkhurst's Hebrew Lexicon, under the head 3. tations are admitted, and no new lights struck out from ingenious etymologies: he is here presented with the calm dispassionate evidence of fact, and when those facts are most pregnant of conclusions adverse to Christianity, they are invariably adduced in the words and on the authority of Christians themselves, whose disinterestedness, at least, in yielding admissions of this character, is no more to be questioned, than their learning and piety to be surpassed. The great source of difficulty aud mistake in tracing the identity of the parent figment through the multifarious forms of the ancient idolatry seems to arise from the change of epithets and names, while yet it is but one, and the same deity and demi-god who is meant under a hundred designations. Thus, the names under which the Sun has been the real and only intended object of divine worship, have been as various and as many as the nations of the earth on which his light has shone. And as various are the allegories and fictions of his passing through the zodiacal sign of the Virgin, which, of course, would remain a virgin still; his descending into the lower parts of the earth; his rising again from the dead; his ascending into heaven, his opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers; his casting his bright beams of light through twelve months, or Apostles, one of whom (FebruaryJudas) lost a day, and by transgression (or skipping over) "fell, that he might go to his own place," (Acts i. 25); "his preaching the acceptable year of the Lord," (Luke iv. 9). By all which metaphorical personifications, were typified the natural history or circumstances observable in the Sun's progress through the twelve months which constitute the natural year. The Jews in vain endeavour to disguise the fact, that they also were Sun worshippers. We find, from their own sacred books, that their Solomon, after having built a temple to Jehovah, "did build also ar high place for wow Chemosh (that is, the SUN), the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem," (1 Kings, xi. 1); and so late as to the reign of Josiah, successive kings of Judah "had dedicated horses to the Sun; and the chariots of the Sun were at the entering in of the House of the Lord ?"-(2 Kings xxii. 11.) The prophet Malachi expressly speaks of Christ, under the same unaltered name of Chemosh, the abomination of the Moabites- ww -Chapter iii, verse 4, or iv. 2. Which being, by our evangelical reformers, very conveniently translated the Sun of Righteousness,* of course could refer to nothing else than Jesus Christ, and so conceals the idolatry, while it conveys the piety. נאם יהוה לאדני שב לימיני עד אשית אביך הדם לרגליך : The same deity, however, under his name ADONIS, without any change but that of the various pronouns, suffices to indicate my Adon, our Adon, &c. is the undisguised idol who is addressed innumerable times throughout the book of Psalms, under that name, and to whose honour, in common with that of Jehovah, they were composed and dedicated. The 110th Psalm, of which the first verse rendered into English, is, "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemy thy footstool,"* should have been rendered, "Yahou said unto Adonis." The two idols were worshipped in the same house of the Lord, which was at Jerusalem: Yahou, or Jack, sat on the lid of a box, ridiculously called the ilasterion, or mercy-seat; while Adonis seems to have occupied the vestibule, or entering in of the house of the Lord. The rest of the Psalm is a dialogue, in which Jao, or Jack, proposes terms of alliance between himself and Adonis, and engages to join him in the slaughter of their enemies. The preference of the Jews for Adonis, who was distinguished for his personal beauty above the cloven-footed and long-nosed Jehovaht has induced them to this day, not only to read the name Adon, wherever it occurs, but entirely to banish the recollection of Jao altogether. They substi tute the name Adon in every instance where our translators have put Jehovah, or the Lord; so that in the reading of those to whom these lively oracles were committed, it is not Jehovah, but the Phoenician deity Adonis, who is the God of the Old Testament. Jehovah then, had more than cause enough for jealousy against the encroachments of Adonis, and in one most striking instance, the worship of this idol, under his name TAMMUZ, is denounced as an atrocious abomination. Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house, which was towards the north, and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz.-(Ezekiel viii. 14.) Here Jerome interprets n Tammuz, by Adonis, who, he observes, is, in Hebrew and Syriac, called Adonis. "I find myself obliged, (says the pious author of the Greek and Hebrew Lexicons,) to refer Tammuz as well as the Greek and Roman Hercules, to that class of idols, which was originally designed to represent the promised Saviour, the Desire of all nations. His other name, Adonis, is almost the very Hebrew or our Lord, a well-known title of Christ." * The Hebrew has no adjectives: Sun of Righteousness is their idiom for the Righteous Sun. See the plate of him in Parkhurst, and his convincing arguments in proof that the beast with four faces and four wings, standing like a cock upon a honroost, on one leg, "must be referred to Jehovah only," under the head 27 Such are the words of the ingenious, most learned, and orthodox Parkhurst, who proceeds to exhibit this resemblance of Adonis and Christ, by subjoining, with acknowledgements to his authorities Spearman and Godwyn, a passage from Julius Firmicius, which in my earlier writings I was content to quote, as he had done, at second-hand. The retirement and leisure however which my Christian persecutors have forced upon me, and the attentions of my unbelieving friends, have enabled me to study the very rare and curious original itself, It is an oration or address of Julius Firmicius delivered to the Emperors Constans and Constantius; the object of which was to induce those pious princes to seize the property of their Pagan subjects, and apply it to Christian uses-than which, of course, nothing could have been more orthodox. After forty-five pages of abuse heaped on the ancient Pagans for their egregious forms of idolatry, in which by a most curious mystical interpretation of their ceremonies, he discovers Christ to have been represented by them all, he adds, *"Let us propose another symbol, that by an effort of cogitation, their wickedness may be revealed, of which we must relate the whole process in order that it may be manifest to all, that the law of the divine appointment hath been corrupted by the devil's perverse imitation. On a certain night (while the ceremony of the Adonia, or religious rites in honour of Adonis lasted) an image was laid out upon a bed, and bewailed in doleful ditties. After they had satiated themselves with fictitious lamentations, light was brought in; then the mouths of all the mourners were annointed by the priest, upon which the priest, with a gentle murmur, whispered Trust ye, saints, your God restored, Trust ye, in your risen Lord; * Aliud etiam symbolum proponamus, ut conamine cogitationis, scelera revelentur, cujus totus ordo dicendus est, ut apud omnes constet divinæ dispositionis legem, perversa Diaboli imitatione corruptam. Nocte quadam simulacrum in lectica supinum ponitur, et per numeros digestis fletibus plangitur. Deinde cum se ficta iamentatione satiaverint, lumen infertur. Tunc a Sacerdote omnium qui flebant, fauces unguntur, quibus perunctis, sacerdos lento murmure susurrat: Θαρρείτε μυσται το θες σεσωσμένες Εσται γαρ ημιν εκ πόνων σωτηρία. Literally, "Trust ye communicants; the God having been saved, there shall be to us out of pains, salvation." Godwyn, who seems not to have discovered the metre of the original, renders it " Trust ye in God, for out of pains, salvation is come to us." |