really she who figured as Beltis, the wife of Bel, the "Great Lady." The idea of marriage once introduced among the gods, all must, of course, be represented alike, — all save the Supreme, who was too high, and too indefinite, not to say too holy (in the ecclesiastical sense) to allow it. It is important to notice that Il, who formed the basis of Hebrew theology, was beyond the reach of such polytheistic notions as are implied in a divine consort. Scarcely less important is it to observe how accidental and shadowy, and almost uncertain, was, for instance, the wife of Hea. It is as if such a relation were an afterthought. Her titles, and her very name, have nothing distinctive.

The feminine sun was represented under three aspects, respectively called Ai, Gula, and Annunit; the rising, the meridian, and the setting sun. Must we not find in Ana, Bel, and Hea the old masculine forms of the same? Nothing is easier than to recognize in Bel the meridian sun, the very name implying some character of that orb; and his representation as the hero and hunter, (the Nimrod of Genesis,) helps to identify him with the sun in his brightness and strength, he who shoots the arrows of the sun-stroke. But Ana is not the rising sun. Everything goes to connect him with the west, with darkness, death, and the under-world. Ana is the setting sun, who is placed first in the triad, as, with the Egyptians and the Hebrews, the evening was put before the morning, and the day was born of the night. As Bel corresponds to Gula, so Ana is but a slight variation of the masculine of Annunit. Shall we find a like relation between Ai and Hea? Do they resemble each other in significance as in form? Hea is the god of light, and life, and knowledge, - the god of glory and of giving. Especially he is the intellectual guide and teacher. He was represented as having come up out of the Persian Gulf to teach the primitive Chaldeans. Can we fail to see as the foundation of this myth the adoration of the sun when rising from that sea.* As Elohim the primary name of God with the Hebrews came from the word signifying the sun, so Jehovah appears to be derived from the name which once meant the rising sun, the bringer of light and life. What if both Chaldeans and Hebrews had forgotten the originals? How easily etymologies slip out of sight and the true get exchanged for fictitious; but character and position remain to bear the true record.

Of the pyramidal temples devoted to planetary worship, in the val

There are independent reasons for fixing the early centre of semitic civilization on the north-western side of the Persian Gulf, whose ancient boundaries were somewhat different from the modern.

ley of the Euphrates, a single one remains, sufficiently preserved to declare its original form and character, the "Temple of the Seven Spheres" at Borsippa, the structure called by the Arabs Birs-Nimrud. It is built in seven stages, all of them perfectly square, the lowest two hundred and seventy-two feet on a side, and each higher one forty-two feet less than the one next preceding, making the highest stage twenty feet square. The Temple, as its name implies, represents the planetary system according to the ancient astronomy. The lowest and broadest stage is for Saturn, the planet whose orbit embraces all the rest, as this story sustains all the others. The next higher is for Jupiter, the third for Mars, the fourth for the Sun, the fifth for Venus, the sixth for Mercury, and the seventh for the Moon. Each was colored according to the hue believed appropriate, — Saturn's black, Jupiter's orange, Mars's red, the Sun's golden, Venus's yellow, Mercury's blue, and the Moon's silver. We have in these stages the order of the planets which forms the basis of the names and the succession of the days of the week. Astrology requires each hour of the day to be under a particular planet. And inasmuch as the sway of Saturn was wider than that of any other, so there was felt to pertain to this orb and deity a peculiar majesty, power and sacredness. It would be natural, then, to begin with Saturn, and going through with all, put the seventh hour under the moon; and then again the eighth under Saturn, and the fourteenth under the moon. So the twenty-fourth would be under Mars, and the first hour of the next day under the sun. In this way it would happen that the first hour of the third day would be under the moon, and of the fourth under Mars. Naming each day after the planet of its first hour, we have the order: Saturn's day, Sun's day, Moon's day, Mars's or Tiu's day, Mercury's or Woden's day, Jupiter's or Thor's day, and Venus's or Freya's day. The first day of the week was however not Saturday. With a people whose religion had always been the worship of the sun, it would be necessary, while maintaining the order of succession from Saturn to the moon, to allow the sun the first place. Our week, then, which is the week of history, could have had no other origin than an astrological or planetary one.

Now the Jewish Sabbath was the seventh day of the week; which shows, in the first place, that the Jews had entirely disconnected their deity from the sun-god; * and in the second place it shows that the week did not originate with them, since otherwise their holy day would have had the first place instead of the last. Where the week

The Babylonians and Assyrians had done precisely the same in the case of their Supreme.

originated, the holiest day must have been Sunday. The most remarkable fact is, however, the implication that Iah was in some way associated with Saturn, since he had for his own, Saturn's day, the seventh of the week. Looking into the Chaldean mythology for explanation, we find that as Bel became confounded with the planet Jupiter, so for some unknown reason it happened with Hea and the planet Saturn. The same numerical representative 40, stood for both, and they had many characteristics and epithets in common. How natural, therefore, that Hea's or Iah's day should be Saturn's. May not the frequent recurrence of the number forty, in the Old Testament myths, signify that the Hebrew people descended from a branch of the Chaldean family, which had for its tutelary deity the God with whom the number was superstitiously connected?

Regarding the source of the theology of the ancient Hebrews, justice has never been done to their Chaldean ancestry. There, we may find, not only the primitive form of the most important Biblical legends, such as those of the Creation, of Paradise, of the Deluge, and of the Tower of Babel, but also symbols and ideas popularly supposed to be peculiarly Jewish. The ark of God, the cherubim, and many epithets of the Deity seem to have passed almost or quite unchanged from the Euphrates to the Jordan. The respect shown to the full moon, in the Jewish ritual, is eminently suggestive of an earlier moon-worship.

One is tempted to go on and on in this fascinating comparison of the offspring with the parent, but as we must confine ourselves to the names of God and that which strictly belongs thereto, we will conclude with a single inference, so evidently just that the only wonder is its having been overlooked. We read in 2 Kings, xviii: 4, that Hezekiah coming upon the throne of Israel and zealously destroying the rank growths of idolatry, "brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it." The story of Moses making a brazen serpent in the wilderness, of course shares the fate of the whole mythical legend. But if that story were history, nothing would be more improbable than that the image, representing no god and no present object of either love or fear, should be worshipped as an idol. What then shall we make of this serpent? It ought to stand for some deity. If, more than once, the Israelites made a golden calf, or bull, for an image of Jehovah,* why may they not have made for the same purpose, a brazen serpent? It is now easy to under

* Jahn's Biblical Archæology, § 405.

stand how they might have made a calf for an image of Jehovah. The bull was the grand symbol of Saturn, the double, as it were, of Hea. There was a yet better reason for idolizing a brazen serpent; for the serpent was Hea's special symbol. There was a wide-spread persuasion that the serpent was wiser than any other animal. It has also a remarkable tenacity of life. The same word in Arabic, Hiya, with which Hea and Iah are most probably connected, signifies both "life" and " serpent." The serpent, which was at first merely Hea's symbol, may have been worshipped, first with the Chaldeans, then with the Hebrews, as the sacred image of the Deity himself.

DANIEL BOWEN.

In this God's world, with its wild, whirling eddies, and mad-foam oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, even wise because they denied, knew forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing. My friend, if thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back, in support of an unjust thing, and infinite bonfires visibly waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on behalf of it, I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down thy baton, and say, "In God's name, No!" Thy "success ! poor devil, what will thy success amount to? If the thing is unjust, thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires blazed from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote leading articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight, to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing. Success? In a few years thou will be dead and dark - all cold, eyeless, deaf; no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells, or leading articles, visible or audible to thee again at all, forever. What kind of success is that? — Carlyle.

It were a pity, many will think, that the author of the above paragraph should not have learned the lesson it proclaims with such an emphasis better. But to have once had such a trumpet voice for Justice, is no slight affair of itself. Many a flippant critic to-day, who rides into notice on the great man's fallen name, might well beseech the stars, and all things else, for a moment of such rapt vision. It is a fine, easy thing to be sentimentally virtuous and just. "Shooting Niagara : and After?" has furnished our pettifogging politicians and belated newspaper editors with a whole month's capital. "Alas, how are the might fallen!" they cry. O yes, but alas ten times more for such as have no ver begun to be "mighty" either in speaking the truth, or in rendering justice! These will never fall, and for the best of reasons. ED.

THE TWO RELIGIONS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.

II.

AN angel may appear in human semblance; a man may possess

angelic virtues; but angel and man are wholly distinct beings, by every indication that marks them as man or as angel. A god-man, that is, a god who is at the same time a man, - a man who is at the same time a god, is a being useful enough for the legerdemain of theologians, but quite inconceivable by thought. The god may seem to be human, the man may very really be divine, but for all that the god and the man cannot be confounded in one person.

I think I have shown that Jesus and Christ are in the New Testament described as two individuals, each having an origin, an experience, a career of his own. I have offered the external evidence of this, from the biographical incidents through which the two pass. I will now exhibit the same fact interiorly, by showing that their thoughts are as unlike as their experiences, and their spirits as dissimilar as their bodies. Between the intellectual worlds in which Jesus and the Christ live, an impassable gulf is fixed.

Jesus the Jesus of Matthew, the man Jesus is a teacher of moral and religious truth. It is generally allowed, that the teaching which is ascribed to Jesus in the first gospel, is authentic, and it is largely held now that no other teaching ascribed to him, is. The genuine sayings are in the book which tepresents him as being a simple man. The Sermon on the Mount is in Matthew; the great Parables are in Matthew The Sower, The Tares, The Mustard Seed, The Leaven, The Pearl, The Net, The King and his Servants, The Husbandman and the Vineyard, The Marriage Feast, The Talents, The Virgins, all here, dropping like diamonds from the Teacher's lips.

Here are the discourses about providence, retribution, reward, and punishment; the laws of influence, the conditions of the Eternal life, marriage and divorce, poverty and riches. Here are the Beatitudes which announce the nature and rules of happiness; the ethics of the Sabbath and the Hebrew law are here: here, in short, is every doctrine that bears directly on human character and human life. All this proceeds from one who claims for himself no higher office than that of Teacher, or regenerator of men by truth. He makes no mystery of his instructions, either as regards their substance or the source from whence they are derived. His thoughts are taken from Moses and the prophets; from the book of nature;