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the life, or spiritus, and intelligence or divine wisdom which, in their mode of reasoning, belonged essentially to the divinity of the world, and made part of his unique substance, since it is impossible any could exist which was not one of its parts. All these distinctions, so subtile and refined, belonged to the Platonicien and Pythagorean philosophies, and had nothing whatever to do with what is called revelation.

There were no expressions more familiar to the ancient philosophers than the following:-" The universe is a great animated being, which encloses within itself all the principles of life and intelligence spread in its parts. That great being sovereignly intelligent is God himself, that is to say, God, word or reason, mind or universal life."

The universal soul designated spiritus, and compared with the spirit of life which animates all nature, distributes itself principally in the seven celestial spheres, of which the combined action was reputed to regulate the destinies of man, and spread the germs of life in all that which exists on this globe. The ancients symbolized that breath or spiritus which produces the harmony of the spheres, by a flute with seven reeds, that they placed in the hands of Pan, or the image meant to represent universal nature; from whence comes also the opinion, that the soul of the world was enclosed in the number seven, an idea that the Christians borrowed from the Platoniciens, and that they have expressed by the sacrum septenarum, or by the seven gifts of the holy spirit, as the breath of Pan, that of the holy spirit was, according to Saint Justin, divided in seven spirits. The unction of the proselytes was accompanied by an invocation to the holy spirit; they called it the mother of the seven houses, which signified, according to Beausobre, mother of the seven skies; the word spiritus in the Hebrew language feminine.

The Musselmen and the eastern Christians give to the third person of the trinity, for its essential property, life, that is, according to the first, one of the attributes of the divinity. The Syrians call it mehaia or living, and the credo of the Christians gives to it the epithet vivificantem. It is then, in their theology, the principle of life which animates nature, or that universal soul, principle of movement of the world, and also of all the beings it contains. This is the vivifying force, emanating from God, who, according to Varro, governs the universe by movement and by reason; for it is the spiritus which spreads life and motion in the world, and it is reason or wisdom which gives to it the direction and regulates its effects. That

spiritus was God, in the system of the ancient philosophers, who wrote upon the universal soul, or spiritu mundi. It is the nursing or nourishing force of the world, according to Virgil, spiritus intus alit. The divinity, according to their system, emanated from the first monad, and extended itself as far as to the soul of the world, according to Plato and Porphery, or as far as the third God, to use their own expressions. Thus the spiritus was God, or rather a faculty of the universal divinity.

Besides the principle of life and of motion, these same philosophers admitted a principle of intelligence and of wisdom, under the names of we and of logos, or of reason and the word of God. God was said to reside principally in luminous substances. The word light in some languages, the French for example, signifies equally intelligence and physical light, for intelligence may be considered to the soul what light is to the eye. We need not, therefore, feel astonished that the Christians should contend that Christ is the light which enlightens every man coming into the world, and to make him the son of the father of all light; that which is certainly true in a metaphysical and in a merely physical sense, as Christ was nothing more than the luminous part of the divine essence rendered sensible to man by the Sun, in which, poetically considered, it may be said to be incorporated or incarnated. It is under that last form that he is susceptible of augmentation and of divination, and that he has been the object of sacred fictions made upon the birth and the death of the god Sun or Christ.

Another Letter must be devoted to the subject of the trinity, and if our readers object that the ideas we have attempted to set forth, touching the trinity, are of a mystical and unsatisfactory order, we can assure them, that, at all events, is not to be placed to the accounts of our misdeeds. There have been no ideas of God, yet given in the world, which have not been mystical and unsatisfactory, and the reason is, that there is no prototype in nature answering to the word God. Before we can hope to teach others, we must first comprehend ourselves, and if we fail in this, our .lessons are given at random. All that has been written about trinity, has not helped us to one atom of real knowledge upon the subject; nor should we have noticed the question were it not necessary to establish our position-that there never was an incar nated God, or mere man, called Jesus Christ!

London: H. Hetherington; A. Heywood, Manchester; and all Booksellers. J. Taylor, Printer, 29, Smallbrook Street, Birmingham.

EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

AS A HUMAN BEING,

DISPROVED!

BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE, IN A SERIES OF LETTERS,

FROM A GERMAN JEW,

ADDRESSED TO CHRISTIANS OF ALL DENOMINATIONS.

LETTER 16.

WEEKLY.

ONE PENNY.

"I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel. Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and besides me there is no Saviour.”—ISAIAH XLIII. 3, 10, 11.

CHRISTIANS,

The Stoics taught that Jupiter, or that sovereign intelligence which they supposed to rule the world, was contained in the luminous substance called Ether, which substance they regarded as the source or spring of human intelligence. Such an opinion, it must be confessed, savored much of Materialism; but, that should by no means surprise us, as it is clear that men were in former times accustomed to reason upon the matter that they saw and which struck their senses, before they dreamt about an immaterial being -or existence that they have since created by abstraction. If Plato were to shew his head above ground just now, he certainly would not complain, as he did in his Republic, of " blind men and dreamers who neglecting divine ideas and heavenly truths (that he names, strangely enough, the only beings, as though truths could be beings), give themselves up entirely to the body," which, he contends, is nothing more than a shade or shadow of a thing. It is clear, that matters have greatly changed since Plato wrote, as little now is taught but "divine ideas and heavenly truths;" ideas so essentially divine that divinities alone can comprehend their truths. -so very heavenly that inhabitants of earth, mere mortals, fail to reach

their sublimity, and souls by our spiritual teachers, are far more considered than bodies, the latter of which, Plato (by sages called divine) informs us, are nothing more than shades or shadows of things, and as for the former,we suppose they are the shades or shadows of nothing; but this is merely supposition on our part, and as about the shadows of souls, little is known and a great deal said, the question can be best settled by theologists; in the mean time it will be well to proceed with our subject.

It is certain that matter, how subtile soever, is still matter; and as the ancient philosophers contended that the soul of man, as the souls of brutes, was but an emanation of subtile matter endowed with the faculty of thought, they have been called, and very properly, called, Atheists, and we may add, that the assertion made by Catholicus, a writer in the " Times" (some few weeks since), that the more modern experimental philosophers of Greece and Rome were Atheists, is also beyond dispute; but as to the question of experimental philosophy, it was a philosophy little understood, and very partially adopted by either Greeks or Romans. One thing, however, is certain, which is, that in the early ages of the world, matter was deemed capable of thought, and what is called animal life was considered as a phenomenon necessarily resulting from certain combinations and conditions of matter. We have grown

so much wiser since the schoolmaster was abroad, at least we think we have, that such opinions appear abominable, absurd, and heterodox wild dreams; but then, it should be remembered that philosophers of all climes, complexions, degrees, and ages, have occasionally been found a napping; surely if they fall asleep and dream, the vulgar may be expected to follow their example-nap and dream likewise; and if such sleepings and dreamings should be flattering and pleasant, wish to dream on, and dislike not a little any who rashly arouses them from their delicious reveries,―growing angry, like Mycille, in Lucien, who is said to have well supped with a neighbour, and dreaming during the night that he had become rich, that he was carried about upon the shoulders of slaves, and enjoyed all the pleasures of opulence, was so enraged against the cock that crowed him out of his delicious dreamery, that he felt every disposition to choke it. The fate of the cock is that of all men who, by their crowing (i. e. speaking or writing) arouse their fellow-beings from the slumbers of fanaticism-disturb their

superstitious dreams, and thereby bring them to a sense of their miserable and degraded condition. But enough of dreaming and dreamers for the present.

Pythagoras has called God the active, ever-varying subtile particles, which seem in eternal and universal motion; and distinguishes God by the epithet luminous, from which all other existences he supposed to have been created; and according to Saint Augustine, the creation of celestial intelligence is comprised in the substance called light. All these were said to be participators in that eternal light which, they tell us, constituted the wisdom of God; and that we call, (say the saints,) his only Son. The most learned and ancient fathers of the Christian church, and the early orthodox writers, constantly say that "God is a light, and a light very sublime, that all we behold of brightness, however brilliant it may be, is nothing more than a portion-a feeble ray of that light; that the Son is a light without commencement; that God is a light inaccessible, which enlightens eternally, and which never disappears, and that all the virtues which surround divinity are lights of the second order-rays of the first light."

The theology of Orpheus likewise taught that light, called the most ancient of beings, and the most sublime, is God-that inaccessible God who envelopes all in his substance, called counsel, light, and life; which theological ideas have been copied by Saint John, the Evangelist, who says "The life was the light, and the light was the life; and that the light was the word, or the counsel, and the wisdom of God."

A sufficient number of authorities have been quoted to shew that it was a received dogma among the ancient theologians, that God was a luminous substance, and that light constituted the intelligent part of the universal soul of the world, or universal God. The Sun seeming to be the great focus of light, was regarded as the intelligence of the world, or at least, its principal seat, hence the epithets animus mundi, or intelligence of the universe, the eye of Jupiter, that the ancient mystics applied to the light, as well as that first production of the Father, or his first-born Son.

These ideas, with many others of an equally useless character, have passed into the theology of the adorers of the Sun, known under the name of Christ, the Son of the Father or the first God; hiş first emanation—a God consubstantial, or formed of the same lu

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