which it is emblematical. These imaginations of emanations must be believed to be the souls of all beings that display life, either vegetable or animal; the impure must be condemned to purgatory in unclean animals, passing through gradations of purification, until united to the original source, the Divinity whence they originally came. Bramha is a name that must be revered, reverenced, and adored, as the infinite soul, the ruler of the universe. He must be pourtrayed in words, to the imagination, as infinitely wise, infinitely benign, merciful, and benevolent; but in reality his character must be revengeful, vindictive, and inexorably cruel; an exemplar for mortal kings, emperors, and priestly sovereigns. He must be adored and contemplated in silence, and manifest himself to the fallen race of man in a variety of forms, and through diverse mediums; by acasavani, or divine sounds from heaven, or the etherial voice; by meteors in the sky, or flames of fire (agnivupti); by avatara, or the deity descending from heaven, and dwelling in the flesh in the form of man. Yes, I will conjure up a mighty host of divinities, subdue and humble to the dust this godlike race, pervert their good into evil, and evil into seeming good. Arise! ye visions of the future, Brahma, Vishnu, Seeva, Chandra, Hara, Chrishna, and Kalee, extend your potent wand over the earth, and cover her and her children with darkness, thick darkness that may be felt,-impenetrable, immoveable, and eternal!

Whilst I was thus, as the Prince of Darkness and of power over spirits, revelling in the visions of the future, over the deep humiliation of the family of man, the glorious work gradually, slowly, but with certainty advanced. Every age gave birth to divinities, or to doctrines, or mysteries relating to them. The secret history of Brahma as of all other gods, was a delineation of the march of the sun through the twelve signs of the heavens, and of the four seasons of the year. He was the creator, upholder, and preserver of all. He gave to man corn, the knowledge of agriculture, the fruits of the earth, and to all that has breath, vital existence. His service and worship are sacred duties. He is the soul of the universe and the source of the souls of men. All the Devas or gods have been and are manifestations of Brahma. Chrishna, (under another name) shall be the most famed; the shepherd's boy shall be warrior, hero, divinity. My influence is now supreme, irresistible. The design must succeed. He is proclaimed divine, the god beams forth in his countenance; legions assemble round his banner of the cross and the lamb. Everywhere war breathes out destruction, pestilence, and death. Everywhere he triumphs, victory attends upon his steps, the impress of his foot is stained with human gore. His first mission is not peace but a sword;' the end, an empire over the minds and policy of this dark-coloured race. How they bow their stiff necks to the iron yoke of sacred despotism! But all subdued, Chrishna changes from the hero of war, to the holy being, is elevated into an incarnation of Brahma. His history becomes a sacred revelation from heaven, science brought down from the celestial regions personified and mystified; and a scheme of sacred delusion, becomes at once the hope and terror of the human race. And I now settle down into the luxurious feelings of remorseless and sullen cruelty, like the sated lion over his slaughtered victim.

As I thus lowered, like a contagious pestilential cloud, over the minds and destinies of man, the divine' plan gradually and slowly developed itself. My devotees sanctified rivers, performed pilgrimages to the banks of the overflowing streams, attributed visionary virtues to their waters; believed they

washed themselves from moral and unhallowed impurities; threw themselves into these waters to perish, that they might pass into the realms of spirits, returning to the source from whence they came. What felicity, to me, could equal this? Yet one more abounding had to follow! My soul was elevated in gloomy extasies whilst I looked down with scorn on these sons of visionary purity. My spirit was personified in the descendants of the Devas, (gods) of Chandra, and Chrishna, the reputed divine natures. One more celebrated than his predecessors in the midst of earthly grandeur, surrounded with a profusion of wealth and in the vigour of youth, was seized by the polluted hand of disease, and he passed away from mortal life. His widow believed in his purity and god-like descent. His corpse must be consumed by fire, that his soul might pass to heaven, through that pure medium. To that place of peace and bliss she longed to hasten, to be united to her lord. Persuasion, unassuageable grief, posthumous honours,--the vain hope and ambition of being ranked amongst the gods, aided by the priesthood, my servants, conspired to form the monstrous but firm resolve. The funeral pyre is constructed, pile upon pile it rises like a temple, to receive a living sacrifice to dead divinities. Ablutions were passed through, prayers and preparatory sacrifices ascended to heaven; the music of hell burst forth, while all that is young, beautiful, and amiable, climbs the hideous altar; the priests officiate in well dissembled solemnity; the holy fire is applied to the inflammable material; not a sigh or groan is heard, and the living victim is consumed with the dead. How the multitude shout, the priests pray!—I laugh at the madness and vanity of human wishes and human woes.

Demon of Despotism, that I am, something like a shudder of horror passed through my soul, whilst I looked down on this exhibition of sacred woe, of human weakness, priestly craft, cruelty, and domination. But repentance is unknown to spirits. This was only the dawn of the gloomy ages of fanaticism and superstition; the future promised to be more prolific of extravagancies and sacred insanities. Numberless god-images of wood and stone sprang into existence; prayers and sacrifices were offered to them, as to vital, sentient, thinking beings. The more ugly and deformed, the more god-like, until one monster great idol became supreme. Once a year he is drawn from his sanctuary; drawn out by human strength and hailed with enthusiastic shouts, and feelings of wild, ungovernable devotion; moves a whole nation, nay, an entire race, but cannot move himself! Thousands and hundreds of thousands fall before him; they run mad, their brain turns round with the delirium of over-heated fanaticism; the car moves slowly but majestically along; some of the devotees rush towards the monster, squat themselves on the ground, the wheels pass over their bodies, their blood dyes the earth, and their souls are offered up a valueless atonement for hypothetical sins and offences. Whilst their mangled bodies and the vital fluid sent upwards a vapour, to heaven, I inhaled it as a rich smelling savour, an acceptable sacrifice to the Demon of Despotism.

Yes, I exclaimed, living or dying their bodies and souls are mine! Whether they stand or lie, or walk like the beast of the field, or roll their bodies on the surface of the earth; perform penances, mortify the flesh, or annihilate their minds; they are still mine. There are bending their bodies to the ground, and adoring the sun; thousands and tens of thousands praying to and worshipping images; standing in mortifying attitudes, until their sinews are rigid, their limbs immoveable ;--fists clenched until the nails pierce through the palms of their hands, and appear on the other side; travelling as pilgrims, on their hands and knees; or rolling their bodies over and over for hundreds

of miles, and thus punishing themselves to purify the soul. For these sacred deeds of folly, they are revered, esteemed holy,-immortalised! Nay; this deluding priesthood feed to repletion holy crocodiles, whilst their brethren die of hunger. Thus is the humiliation and degradation of the people consummated; they are divided into castes; and the absolute power of one man, the fabled descendant of the gods or of the celestial king, is rampant ; before him all crouch with servility and tremble in submission, whilst my empire over man is universal and eternal.

(To be continued in next number.)

CRITICAL EXEGESIS OF GOSPEL HISTORY,

ON THE BASIS OF STRAUSS'S LEBEN JESU.'

A SERIES OF EIGHT DISCOURSES; DELIVERED AT THE LITERARY INSTITUTION, JOHN STREET, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, AND AT THE HALL OF SCIENCE, CITY ROAD, ON SUNDAY EVENINGS, DURING THE WINTERS OF 1848-9, AND 1849–50.

BY THOMAS COOPER,

Author of The Purgatory of Suicides.'

VII. THE RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION.

WHEN the golden orb of day rose above the mountains, dispelling the mists. that hung above the vallies,—and the birds, already risen from their leafy coverts, began to pour forth a bolder and richer melody, and the flowers began to unclose their beauteous buds, and to yield their fragrant perfume to the air,—the tribes of early men must have hailed the resurrection of the Bringer of Light with unspeakable rapture; and there is no wonder that almost every ancient nation worshipped the sun, as their Joy-God. In India he was personified, and became the second person of their Trinity-Veeshnu, or Chrishna, the Preserver,-from his attribute of maturing, and ripening the fruits of the earth, warming its soil with its genial rays; and thus, from year to year, keeping up the vigour and life of all existence. Chrishna, too, became incarnate, or took upon him human form, was born of a virgin, and was at tended in his childhood by shepherds, performed miracles, and even raised the dead. Mithras, the second person of the old Persian Trinity was also a personification of the sun, the great Preserver of Nature. Osiris, in the Egyptian Trinity, is again represented as symbolising the sun. He was the chief god of the ancient Babylonians, under the name of Bel or Baal; and the books of the Old Testament testify that he was worshipped under the same name among the Phenician or Canaanitish nations, whom the Israelites dislodged from Palestine. In the Greek and Roman mythology, the sungod Helios, or Phoebus, or Apollo, was endowed with a rank only inferior to that of Zeus or Jupiter, the Omnipotent Father. Our old Teutonic forefathers rendered the sun peculiar honours, as a high-god, and dedicated to his worship the first day of the week, which, in spite of our established Christianity after so many hundred years, still bears the name they gave it---Sunday. Even before they conquered the land, the ancient Keltic inhabitants raised their altars to the sun, and erected to him their upaithric or unroofed temples, such as Stonehenge. The fires they were accustomed to kindle in the sun's honour, four times in the year, are not yet forgotten by their descendants. In the mountains of Scotland, the Gael still lights the 'Beltane or Baal's fire, in the month of May, and at Lammas, in August; nor is the

custom unextinct among the Kelts in the wilds of Ireland---where it bears the same name. Even on the Western continent, when the Spaniards discovered it, and called it' a new world,' though it had been inhabited for ages by partially civilised nations---the worship of the sun was the chief feature of religion. The Inca, or sovereign of Peru, was the child of the sun, and was therefore sacred. The sun's worship was performed in a temple glittering with massive gold and silver; and a chief source of the popularity of the play of ‘Pizarro,' in this country was the introduction of one striking spectacle on the stage---the Peruvians worshipping in the temple of the sun, before they went to battle.

It is not merely for shewing how natural and universal was the adoration of the sun among ancient nations that I hastily recount these facts,—but to awaken reflection on a much deeper and weightier thought: the origin and source of the doctrine that to man belongs another life after the grave. A wish, if not a hope, to which the heart of man cleaves when the doctrine has once been taught him; and which some of the strongest-minded men have found it impossible to subdue.

Can any one show us how it was possible, without some natural object to dictate or suggest the thought, for the first men to conceive the thought of a future life? A 'revelation'-do you point to? In what revelation were the first men told that they should live again after death? Direct us to it. If you believe the Old Testament to be a revelation, tell us where it reveals a future state. There is but one passage which is ever made a strong point in it, by theologians, who contend that this doctrine is found in it; and that is found in the Idumean book, 'Job'-'I know that my Redeemer liveth, &c.,' and yet this passage can be made as clear in its meaning, by giving it quite another sense, as it seems to be by giving it the orthodox sense. Adam is told that in the day in which he eats of the fruit in the midst of the garden, he shall surely die-but he is never told that he shall live again: neither is Noah, or Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob; nor do they profess such a doctrine. All the promises given to the patriarchs are temporal; they refer solely to possessions and enjoyments on earth, for themselves or their posterity. In the system of Moses there is no reference to a future state: it is all of the earth, earthy.' Indeed this is so notorious, that to obviate the difficulty in which such an omission has always placed divines, the great bishop Warburton wrote his celebrated masterpiece The Divine Legation of Moses,' in which 2,000 authors are quoted, and in which it is shewn that every heathen legislator of antiquity taught the doctrine of future rewards and punishments as a means of overawing mankind and ensuring, by fear or hope, their observance of certain precepts and their political obedience. Moses, on the contrary, says the episcopal giant of learning,-shews the divinity of his mission by omitting to work on man's fears, or excite his hopes, of a future life by teaching it; and by insisting on the observance of the "Law;" without it. Some people were ill-natured enough to charge the bishop with a sly insinuation against the Christian, or New Dispensation doctrine; but it was quite unfair-for he laid the polemical flail about the shoulders of 'free-thinkers' so lustily, as to shew that he had no sympathy with them.

At a later period the belief in a future state found its way among the Jews. Even when the legend of Elijah--that grandest and sublimest of all the legends of the Old Testament-was written, there seems to have

been some notion of a future existence-Elijah, in the chariot of fire 'went up into heaven.' By the time of Christ—that is, after their acquaintance with the teaching of the refined Greeks, if they had not already borrowed the doctrine of the Eastern people, the sect of the Pharisees were celebrated for their maintenance of this doctrine; while the Sadducees, who were persons of the highest rank, rejected it and denied it altogether.

That it makes no part of the Patriarchal and Mosaic Dispensations is clear. A text or two, by great straining, could not be a satisfactory proof that it was there. What must be more important than all other doctrines put together would have met us on every page, if the writers of the early books had had it revealed to them.

Then how came it into the world? 'Man is like the beasts that perish' -a sentence from the book we have just been speaking of—seemed a natural and rational conclusion. Man never saw a dead dog, after his flesh was mouldered away and his bones were crumbling, start anew into life. He never beheld a resurrection of any animated being; and, as an animal himself, there seemed no hope for him of living again. But a wish is soon father to a thought-(to borrow Shakspere's wisdom); and the feeling of being for ever separated from those he loved, of never more enjoying his favourite pursuits, of remaining for ever unconscious, brought a weight and gloom upon man which seemed unendurable. But the Sun!-did he not go down into the earth, and rise again, daily? The seasons!-did they not return again by his influence? The trees!-did they not again put forth their leaves at the return of his beams? There was hope, then, for man. He was superior to the other animals. They possessed but a limited mind,' instinct' man called it; while he was able to subdue them, to train them, to use them for his own purposes, by the superior gift of reason: he had a soul, a spiritual man within the bodily man. After the grave he would enter on a new home: rude ideas were formed of it, at first: there was hunting in it, and all kinds of pleasure: then it became more elevated—it was an Elysium, a refined existence; while the dread alternative was Tartarus-the gloomy realm of Dis or Pluto, whose gates were kept by the three-headed dog Cerberus.

In the East the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, became the prevailing idea: the soul would pass through many animal forms, and then return to the same man; for which reason the Egyptians embalmed the body that it might be ready when the period arrived-namely, 3,000 years -when the mummy in its fine linen cerements was to be resuscitated by the soul re-tenanting it.

Yet 3,000 years have elapsed since many of those strange relics were embalmed: some of them which have found their way into Europe are believed to be of that date:--but they never awake into life! And when the rest have become as old, they will not be nearer a resurrection. Such an idea demonstrated that those old Egyptians, with all their colossal tombs and temples and amazing pyramids, were children in some things. To judge by what we see of the perishable condition of the body, it never can live again, except in so far as it partakes of life by being separated into other bodies.

Yet the sublimest thinkers cleaved to the doctrine of a future state. It was one of the strongest tenets of Socrates, the great master of moral wisdom among the Greeks. It was the favourite doctrine of his favourite disciple, Plato. The great and good Carpenter's son of Nazareth taught