ago, this fish must have been a principal god amongst the Egyptians and Chaldeans; and certainly, while the sun occupied the fishy sign in the zodiac at the vernal equinox, nothing could be more appropriate than that the emblem god should appear in the shape of a fish, to preach the annual salvation.* Each sign in succession has, by the slow precession of equinoxes, enjoyed a similar honor.

That the Jewish priests, from not having science within themselves, were apt to be too late in borrowing their emblem gods from the more learned hierophants of Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia, appears in that unhandy mistake committed by Jeroboam (1 Kings xiii., 4), in sacrificing to the golden calf, the old representative of the sign Taurus, which was then out of date, when he ought to have been paying his respects to the "Lamb of God," the accredited envoy of the sign of the Ram, which had come into play by the Sun's having entered it some time previously. By the mouth of his messenger, "the Lord" (the Sun) seems to reproach Jeroboam in terms something like the following: "What ignorant ninnies you and your priests are, not to know that, having left my bull-house in the zodiacal town,* and taken a two thousand one hundred and fifty years' lease at the sign of the Ram, I have now nothing to do with calves: go, ye shallow novices, and learn better of your masters, my older and more scientific priests, the Magi and Chaldees, that the appropriate symbol of my worship, is now a Lamb, called the Lamb of God."**

Wherever such digressions as the above are made in the course of these Lectures, they are intended to show that, although we treat the Bible according to its literal meaning, the respect we have for it, so far as it is a book of hidden science, induces us to give such explanations, as they alone do it justice according to knowledge. But since its priests and their ignorant dupes insist on adopting the outward, or sense nonsensical, the best way to expose their folly is to take them at their word..

The legend about the first man may have been taken from Apollodorus' fable of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman with clay, and afterwards animated them with fire which he had stolen from the chariot of the sun; or was the first creation in Genesis imitated from Plato's story of the androgynæ, or double homo, possessing both sexes? Such was the hermaphrodite, or first creation in Genesis; the second was purely masculine, and only one of his ribs turned into the feminine. In the ancient Persian traditions, there were two distinct fables about the creation of man, from which those in Genesis appear to have been taken: but the compiler of that book, knowing both of the stories, and being at a loss which to prefer, has foolishly mingled them together, yet still preserving the two creations. Thus it seems pretty certain that the Jewish fable about the first man and woman is of Persian origin. Henry Lord, in a book written at Surat, on the cosmogonies of India and Persia, and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, says: "In the Persian cosmogony, the name of the first man was Adamoh and of the woman Hevah. From hence come the Adam and Eve of the book of Genesis. Hevah is the name given to the woman, in an English edition of the Bible, printed in 1583."

In the Zoroastrian and Chaldean mysteries, the above supposed originals of the human race were personifications of the zodiacal signs, Bootés and Virgo; and their fall, or expulsion from the summer garden of fruits and flowers, was emblematical of the solar year, after the autumnal equinox. Anciently, in India and Chaldea, the phænomenon of the starry heavens was called Aden, or the Celestial Garden. In all probability the Jews picked up these shreds of figurative astronomy when they were slaves to the Babylonians, and, ignorantly taking them in the literal sense, foisted them into their heterogeneous miscellany. Supported by the sound knowledge of Philo, and all the learned Jews, Origen again shows his contempt for those who understood Genesis literally, and cries out: "What man can be stupid enough to believe that God, acting the part of a gardener, had planted a garden in the east; that the tree of life was a real tree, and that the fruit of it had the virtue of making those who eat of it live for ever?"* The first four chapters of that book contain parts of three, if not four distinct fables, all evidently derived from different sources. The rest of this extraordinary medley, called the Old Testament, is made up of some dramatic fragments of the Egyptians and Persians (as the plague, miracles, and the book of Job), fabulous legends plagiarized by the Jews, barbarous narrative, and the rhapsodies of vagrant minstrels, who sung of past events, seemingly in the future tense.

From a mass of ill-strung fables, derived from such a variety of sources—a chaos of revolting prodigies, mixed up with a few probable facts, such as the expulsion or flight from Egyptian slavery, the murders and devastations in Southern Syria, etc., we cannot, in the bounds of a lecture, notice more than a few of the most prominent miracles, all of which had Pagan prototypes.

As every oriental country had its cosmogony, accounting very clearly, though contrarily to each other, for the origin of things, so all had traditionary floods, which each nation quoted as proof of its antiquity.* Why should not the Jews have one also? The Chaldeans said that theirs happened 25,000 years before the war of Troy, when the immense surface now occupied by the Mediterranean Sea was inundated.. The Egyptians had their inundations; and hence their ark of Osiris (the archetype of the Noah's ark) the same as the constellation Argo. The Greeks had their floods of Ogyges and Deucalion; the latter of which, was fully treated of by Berosus, and after him by Lucian, in his Syrian goddess; but the Jews, who took everything from their masters, borrowed the Chaldean pilot Noe, made him skipper of their ark, slightly changing his name to Noah, and appropriated to themselves the flood of Deucalion,** with all its details, almost word for word as fabled by Berosus and Lucian.. That this tradition was not adopted by the Jews until long after the alleged time of Jehovah's flood, is proved by the orders which he gave Noah respecting clean and unclean beasts, the distinction whereof not being made until several hundred years after the assumed time of