Hindoo chronology and cosmogony, except when a missionary, on
the banks of the Ganges, exhibits it to the pupils of his English
school, as a specimen of the falsehoods which have formed the swaddling
bands of Pantheism.

Failing in the attempt to substitute Brahminism for Christianity,
Infidels beat a retreat from India, and went down into Egypt for help.
Here they made prodigious discoveries of the scientific and religious
truths believed by the worshipers of dogs and dung beetles, recorded
upon the coffins of holy bulls, and the temples sacred to crows and
crocodiles. The age was favorable for such discoveries.

Napoleon and his savans cut out of the ceiling of a temple, at Denderah,
in Egypt, a stone covered with uncouth astronomical, astrological, and
hieroglyphic figures, which they insisted was a representation of the
sky at the time the temple was built; and finding a division made
between the signs of the crab and the lion, and marks for the sun and
moon there, they took it into their heads that the sun must have entered
the Zodiac at that spot, on the year this Zodiac was made; and,
calculating back, found that must be at least seventeen thousand years
ago. Hundreds of thousands visited the wonderful antediluvian monument,
in the National Library, in Paris, where it had been brought; and where
Infidel commentators were never wanting to inform them that this
remarkable stone proved the whole Bible to be a series of lies. A
professor of the University of Breslau published a pamphlet, entitled
_Invincible Proof that the Earth is at least ten times older than is
taught by the Bible_. Scores of such publications followed, and for
forty years Infidel newspapers, magazines, and reviews kept trumpeting
this great refutation of the Bible. From these it descended to the
vulgar, with additions and improvements; and it is now frequently
alleged as proving that "ten thousand years before Adam was born, the
priests of Egypt were carving astronomy on the pyramids." There is
scarcely one of my French or German readers who has not heard of it.

It did not shake the Skeptic's credulity in the least that no two of the
savans were agreed, by some thousands of years, how old it was--that
they could not tell what the Egyptian system of astronomy was--_and that
none of them could read the hieroglyphics which explained it_. Whatever
might be doubtful, of one thing they were all perfectly sure, that it
was far older than the creatio