Chabas and Ebers' description of the bas-relief found in the
temple of Khons, near the great temple of Maut, at Karnac.)]

CHAPTER I.

ANTIQUITY OF CIRCUMCISION.

If the ceremonials of the Catholic Church or the High Church
Episcopalians carry us back into the depths of antiquity, or, as
remarked by Frothingham, that the ceremonies of St. Peter, at Rome,
carried him back to the mysteries of Eulesis, to the sacrificial rites
of ancient Phoenicia, to what misty antiquity does not the contemplation
of the rite of circumcision take us? The Alexandrian library, with its
vast collection of precious records, could probably have furnished us
some information as to its origin and antiquity; but Moslem fanaticism,
with its belief in the all-sufficiency and infallibility of the Koran,
was the destruction of that wonderful repository. We must now depend
wholly on the relation of the Old Testament or on what has since been
written by the Greek and Italian historians as to its origin and
practices. The Egyptian monuments and their hyeroglyphics give us no
information on the subject further back than the reign of Rameses II;
while the oft-quoted Herodotus wrote some fourteen centuries after the
Old Testament relation, and Strabo and Diodorus some nineteen centuries
after the same chronicler. We have, therefore, in their chronological
order, first, the relation of the Bible; then the Egyptian monuments and
their revelations; and, thirdly, the information gathered by Pythagoras,
Herodotus, and other philosophers and historians. To these three
sources we may add the misty mixture of tradition and mythological
events, whose beginnings as to period of time are indefinite. These are
the sources from which we are to determine the origin and antiquity as
well as the character of the rite.

Voltaire found in the subject of circumcision one that he could not
satisfactorily make enter into his peculiar system of general
philosophy. For some reason, he did not wish that the Israelites should
have the credit of its introduction; were he to have admitted that, he
would have had to explain away the divine origin of the rite,--something
that the Hebrew has tenaciously held for over thirty-seven centuries.
Voltaire thought it would simplify the subject by making it originate
with the Egyptians, from whom the Hebrews were to borrow it. To do this
he adopted the relation of Herodotus on the subject. His treatment of
the Jewish race, however