ly rays and emanations of ancient and primitive
traditions, handed down from, generation to generation, since the
beginning of the world, or at least since the fall of man, to all
mankind."--CHEV. RAMSAY, _Philos. Princ. of Nat. and Rev. Relig.,_ vol ii.
p. 8.

[4] "In this form, not only the common objects above enumerated, but gems,
metals, stones that fell from heaven, images, carved bits of wood, stuffed
skins of beasts, like the medicine-bags of the North American Indians, are
reckoned as divinities, and so become objects of adoration. But in this
case, the visible object, is idealized; not worshipped as the brute thing
really is, but as the type and symbol of God."--PARKER, _Disc. of Relig._
b. i. ch. v. p. 50.

[5] A recent writer thus eloquently refers to the universality, in ancient
times, of sun-worship: "Sabaism, the worship of light, prevailed amongst
all the leading nations of the early world. By the rivers of India, on the
mountains of Persia, in the plains of Assyria, early mankind thus adored,
the higher spirits in each country rising in spiritual thought from the
solar orb up to Him whose vicegerent it seems--to the Sun of all being,
whose divine light irradiates and purifies the world of soul, as the solar
radiance does the world of sense. Egypt, too, though its faith be but
dimly known to us, joined in this worship; Syria raised her grand temples
to the sun; the joyous Greeks sported with the thought while feeling it,
almost hiding it under the mythic individuality which their lively fancy
superimposed upon it. Even prosaic China makes offerings to the yellow orb
of day; the wandering Celts and Teutons held feasts to it, amidst the
primeval forests of Northern Europe; and, with a savagery characteristic
of the American aborigines, the sun temples of Mexico streamed with human
blood in honor of the beneficent orb."--_The Castes and Creeds of India,_
Blackw. Mag., vol. lxxxi. p. 317.--"There is no people whose religion is
known to us," says the Abbe Banier, "neither in our own continent nor in
that of America, that has not paid the sun a religious worship, if we
except some inhabitants of the torrid zone, who are continually cursing
the sun for scorching them with his beams."--_Mythology_, lib. iii. ch.
iii.--Macrobius, in his _Saturnalia,_ undertakes to prove that all the
gods of Paganism may be reduced to the sun.

[6] "Varro de religionibus loquens, evidenter dicit, multa esse vera, quae
vulgo scir