66 Upon which their sorrow was turned into joy, and the image was taken, as it were out of its sepulchre." These latter words, though their sense is evidently implied, have no direct authority in the original, but seem to be a scholium of Mr. Spearman. Firmicius, in his tide of eloquence, leaves his conclusion elliptical; and breaks away into indignant objurgation of the priest who officiated in those heathen mysteries, which, he admitted, resembled the Christian sacrament in honour of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so closely, that there was really no difference between them, except that no sufficient proof had been given to the world of the resurrection of Adonis, and no divine oracle had borne witness to his resurrection, nor had he shown himself alive after his death to those who were concerned to have assurance of the fact, that they might believe. The divine oracle (be it observed,) which had borne witness to the resurrection of Christ, but which it it seems had vouchsafed no such honourable testimony to the resurrection of Adonis, was none other than the answer of the God Apollo, at Delphos; which this author derives from Porphyry's books on the Phylosophy of Oracles, and which Eusebius has condescended to quote, as furnishing one of the most convincing proofs that could be adduced from the admission of an adversary of the resurrection of Christ.† "But thou, at least," says Eusebius, "listen to thine own Gods, to thy oracular deities themselves, who have borne witness, and ascribe to our Saviour, not imposture, but piety and wisdom, and ascent into heaven." Quoted in the Author's Syntagma, p. 116. This was vastly obliging and liberal of the God Apollo; only, it happens awkwardly enough, that the whole work (consisting of several books) ascribed to Porphyry, in which this and other admissions equally honourable to the evidences of the Christian religion, are made, was not written by Porphyry, but is altogether the pious forgery of Christian hands; who have kindly fathered the great philosopher with admissions, which as he would certainly never have made them himself, they have very charitatably made for him. But not alone the very name Adon, or Adonai, nor the particular *Dei tui mors nóta est, vita non comparet; nec de resurrectione ejus divinum aliquando respondit oraculum, nec hominibus se post mortem ut sibi crederetur, ostendit, nulla hujus operis documenta promisit, nec se hoc facturum esse præcedentibus monstravit exemplis. · De Errore prof. Relig. p. 45. + Firmicius, quotes this Christian forgery under the title Пep Tns Exo φιλοσοφίας. Eusebius avails himself of it, as Περι λόγιων φιγοσοφίας.-Macknight and Doddridge, strove mightily to enlist it into the service of the Church Militant; but it would not do. manner in which that God was worshipped, occurring as frequently as the name Jehovah, and by the Jews themselves constantly maintained to be the sense of that name, and proper to be used rather than, and instead of it; but the distinctive attributes of Adonis, the peculiarly characteristical epithets and designations by which that idol was identified from all others, prove beyond the possibility of doubt, that the Jews were worshippers of the self-same Adonis, adored by their Phoenician neighbours. Adonis was distinguished for his personal beauty. We find entire odes or psalms in praise of his beauty,* and his characteristic epithet of THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS Used interchangeably, instead of his name. "He appointed singers unto the Lord, and that should praise THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS."-2 Chron. xx. 21. "The Devil," says Firmicius, " has his Christs,"t of which he affects not to deny that this Adonis was one. But one of the strongest sensible proofs of the difference between the false Christs and the true one, which this author could adduce, was that the ointment with which the Pagan priests annointed 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 Firmicius 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 יפיפית מבני ארם הוצק הן בשפתותיך על כן ברכך אלהים לעולם Thou art handsome beyond the sons of Adam, love is diffused in thy lips, for the sake of which, God is enamoured of thee for ever.-Psalm 45. +Habet ergo Diabolus Christos suos, p.46. 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. 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 emergent 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 enquiries, 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 the 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 that Christianity had it, and Paganism had it not; have invented the apology of an hypothesis; that, the Pagan 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 PHŒNICIANS. "It was an established custom among the ancient Phoenicians, on any calamitous or dangerous emergency, for the ruler of the state to offer up, for the 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," * See the Chapter of Admission in this DIEGESIS; and Jones on the Canon, vol. I. p. 12 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 set up over his head, his accusation, written- "THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS." "JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS." Matt. xxvii. 28. Luke xxiii. 11. John xix. 2. 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 newlyinvented 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 66 |