corporeal to spiritual things; and so light came to
typify true religion and the felicity which it imparts. But as light not
only came from God, but also makes man's way clear before him, so it was
employed to signify moral truth, and preeminently that divine system of
truth which is set forth in the Bible, from its earliest gleamings onward
to the perfect day of the Great Sun of Righteousness."

I am inclined to believe that in this passage the learned author has
erred, not in the definition of the symbol, but in his deduction of its
origin. Light became the object of religious veneration, not because of
the brilliancy and clearness of a particular sky, nor the warmth and
genial influence of a particular climate,--for the worship was universal,
in Scandinavia as in India,--but because it was the natural and inevitable
result of the worship of the sun, the chief deity of Sabianism--a faith
which pervaded to an extraordinary extent the whole religious sentiment of
antiquity.[101]

Light was venerated because it was an emanation from the sun, and, in the
materialism of the ancient faith, _light_ and _darkness_ were both
personified as positive existences, the one being the enemy of the other.
Two principles were thus supposed to reign over the world, antagonistic to
each other, and each alternately presiding over the destinies of
mankind.[102]

The contests between the good and evil principle, symbolized by light and
darkness, composed a very large part of the ancient mythology in all
countries.

Among the Egyptians, Osiris was light, or the sun; and his arch-enemy,
Typhon, who ultimately destroyed him, was the representative of darkness.

Zoroaster, the father of the ancient Persian religion, taught the same
doctrine, and called the principle of light, or good, Ormuzd, and the
principle of darkness, or evil, Ahriman. The former, born of the purest
light, and the latter, sprung from utter darkness, are, in this mythology,
continually making war on each other.

Manes, or Manichaeus, the founder of the sect of Manichees, in the third
century, taught that there are two principles from which all things
proceed; the one is a pure and subtile matter, called Light, and the other
a gross and corrupt substance, called Darkness. Each of these is subject
to the dominion of a superintending being, whose existence is from all
eternity. The being who presides over the light is called _God_; he that
rules over the darkness is call