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^QX toljat pxpst ixnm tijese cStoues set uy i 



^^^O the writer, who believes in the pre-Christian erection of 

 ^t^S Stonehenge, it does not appear impossible to arrive at some- 

 thing like a rational conception of the objects of the founders of 

 Stonehenge. Man, even the most savage and degraded, must have 

 his god or gods. The religious instinct implanted in man, and 

 fostered by the constant realization of his own weakness, and of the 

 existence of powers above him, around him, and independent of him, 

 by which his welfare is more or less affected, must have an outcome. 

 And if he knows not the Creator he will worship the creature. And 

 which of God^s creatures would he be so likely to make the object 

 of his simple-minded adoration, as that great body, which, by its 

 light and heat, would appear to him to exercise the most potent in- 

 fluence over his material good ? As the sun simply, or as the sun in 

 connection with the moon and stars, it would be regarded by him as 

 the natural object of his daily worship. " In the East,-" says Dr. 

 Dollinger, " where the stars shine brightly in an ever-cloudless sky, 

 and men more readily receive the influences of these heavenly bodies, 

 astrolatry, or the worship of the stars that illume the earth, developed 

 itself. Above all, it was the sun, the great quickener of nature, 

 adored as the centre and lordly power of the visible universe, as the 

 common source of light and life, by which men felt themselves ir- 

 resistably attracted. For their high, ever-increasing susceptibility 

 of natural impressions, and of the properties of the universe, led 

 them to give themselves up with longing and passion to the sidereal 

 powers, and they felt themselves governed by them as if by magic. 

 The cultus they rendered them, the direction of all their intellectual 

 powers towards them, the sympathy with their phases, their setting, 

 disappearances and re-appearances, the every-where prevalent notion 

 in all antiquity that the heavenly bodies were not dead masses of fire 

 or earth, but living animated beings — all this involved them more 



