The idols are often handsomely dressed, and lights are kept burning before them. Many images have aureoles or rays around their heads.

In worship, the Lama priests use the cross, mitre, dalmatica and cope—-they use holy water and the "toupet ;" they have double choirs, and psalmody; they use exorcism, perfume the air with censers; they bless with the right hand; wear a chaplet; enforce celibacy on the clergy, and spiritual retirement; they adopt the worship of saints; ordain fasts; make religious processions; use long litanies; chant prayers, by night as well as by day; and the priests are tonsured, and profess to give indulgences.

The Buddhists have no sacraments.

The Buddhists do not adore the mother of Sakya, though they call her Saint, i.e., Maya Deva.

All this equally applies to Papal places of worship.

All this applies to the Roman Christians.

The Papal followers have seven.

The Romanists adore the mother of Jesus, and prayer is made to her for aid and intercession.

In the next chapter I propose to examine, as far as authorities will permit, the religion of the Persians - a nation intervening, to a great degree, between the old Aryan. and the Shemitic races.

CHAPTER VII.

In

The Medo-Persians and Parsees. Artfulness of theologians. They systematically break the ninth commandment. Frauds in orthodoxy. A man may use false weights innocently, but is punished, nevertheless. theology ignorance does not justify deceit. Case in trade. Professional blindness. A law for punishing adulteration of truth is wanted. Mosaism and Zoroaster. Parsees and Christians. Moses and Zoroaster. The ancient magi. The Persians. Conflicting ideas of God in Bible. The source of the Biblical theology. Cyrus. Inquiry into the authenticity of the Avesta. The book condemned. Account of the MedoPersian faith from Herodotus. Period of introduction of the Devil to the Bible. Summary. Comparison and contrast. Introduction to next chapter.

IN every ancient, and, indeed, in every modern, faith which I have yet examined, I have been shocked with the manner in which it has been represented by interested opponents. Whether they are Romanists or Protestants, Evangelicals or Ritualists, Orthodox or Non-conformists, all our divines endeavour to prove their own tenets to be the best, by blazoning everything which is good, and veiling from sight everything which is doubtful. This being so, it is not at all surprising that Christians generally should try to exalt the religion professed by themselves over that propounded by others, whom they designate "heathens." But though it is not strange that very human partisans should act thus, it is marvellous to find that all the ardent disciples of Jesus, without an exception, that I know of, should, in their dealings with mankind, systematically break the ninth of those commandments which they assert were given by God to man, upon Mount Sinai. All of them bear false witness against

their neighbour, and give incorrect accounts of themselves in addition. They resemble, indeed, those Dutch merchants whom Washington Irving describes, so pleasantly, in his history of New York, who had two sets of weights, a heavy lot by which to purchase, and a light set by which to sell. Such traders we call "fraudulent;" and I assert that every so-called orthodox polemic whose books I have read deserves the same epithet. Their fraud is shown by the misrepresentations that they make, both of the creed which they uphold and the one which they oppose. The heterodox and the so-called atheist may be trusted, at least, to tell the truth.

In saying this, I do not assert that everyone gives false witness knowingly, any more than I would blame a tradesman for using false scales, or weights, if he could demonstrate that he had purchased them as true, and could show that he had never tampered with them. Yet the law would punish such a man for their use, arguing that he ought to have made inquiry. In one of the large towns of Great Britain, on one occasion, a merchant, believed to be both religious and honest, sold to a broker a cargo of stuff which had no existence, and, when the delivery had to be made, the first destroyed himself, and the second was adjudged to be a culpable bankrupt, because he had taken the existence of the oil for granted, without investigation. Just so it is with ordinary divines; they assume certain statements in their own religious book to be true-they are taught to shut their eyes to the absurdities in the same volume, and to explain away, in one manner or another, everything which militates against common sense. By this plan they contrive to sell, as sterling stuff, something which is made of base material, without knowingly being parties to a fraud. In the same way a shopman may, on the word of the manufacturer, dispose of a piece of goods as wholly silk, although he has a shrewd presump

tion that the fabric contains a large proportion of cotton. For such individuals we have the proverb, "there are none so blind as those who will not see." But these very theologians of whom we are speaking, when they are dealing with the sacred books, ordinary customs, ritual, and the like, of other people, having a different religion to their own, are exact, in the extreme-every absurdity is exhibited ruthlessly; every legend is ridiculed; every discrepancy is magnified; and everything which betrays ignorance, or want of scientific knowledge, is paraded with inglorious ceremony. On the other hand, everything good which is to be found therein is, if possible, suppressed. A book, which was, for a long time, a standard one amongst our divines, entitled, Christ and Many Masters, is particularly open to this charge. In it there is throughout a suppressio veri, a suggestio falsi, and scarcely a page that does not bear false witness. If there were a law to punish those who adulterate or falsify "truth," our magistrates would be kept extremely busy.

As an inquiry into the realities of Buddhism has led us to the belief that the origin of Christianity may be found in the doctrines of the son of Maya, which were adopted with certain Judaic modifications by the sons of Elizabeth and Mary-so it is highly probable that what is called Mosaism. has been built upon the teachings of the Persian or Median theology, said to have been founded by Zoroaster. Perhaps it would be difficult to find any modern evidence of the likelihood of this hypothesis more powerful than the fact that at the present day the Jews and the Parsees fraternize almost like brothers. The latter in England, and, I understand, elsewhere, select, when they can, the house of a Hebrew wherein to lodge, rather than that of any man of another nation. To this testimony, such as it is, we must add another which is very telling, viz., that almost every modern orthodox writer who has treated of Zoroaster, has declared that the