By William Long, Esq. 123 



and more in a service of complete idolatry and worship — religion 

 became astrolatry." ' 



Dean Milman says, " Dovm to the captivity, the Jews of Palestine 

 had been in contact only with the religions of the neighbouring 

 nations, which, however differently modified, appear to have been 

 essentially the same, a sort of Nature-worship, in which the host of 

 heaven, especially the sun and moon, under different names, Baal and 

 Moloch, Astarte and Mylitta, and probably as symbols or represen- 

 tatives of the active and passive powers of nature, no doubt with 

 some distinction of their attributes, were the predominant objects. 

 These religions had long degenerated into cruel or licentious super- 

 stitions ; and the Jews, in falling off to the idolatry of their neigh- 

 bours, or introducing foreign rites into their own religious system, 

 not merely offended against the great primal distinction of their 

 faith — the unity of the Godhead — but sunk from the pure, humane, 

 and comparatively civilised institutes of their law-giver, to the loose 

 and sanguinary usages of barbarism." ^ 



Let us hear, too, what Mr. Tylor (who has made the primitive 

 culture of mankind his especial study) says upon solar worship : 

 " Rivalling in power and glory the all-encompassing heaven, the sun 

 moves eminent among the deities of nature, no mere cosmic globe 

 affecting distant material worlds by force in the guise of light and 

 heat and gravity, but a living reigning Lord : — 



' Thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd, 

 Looks't from thy sole dominion like the God 

 Of this new world.' 



It is no exaggeration to say, with Sir William Jones, that one 



1 " The Gentile and the Jew," vol. i., p. 67. 



' History of Christianity, book i., c. 2. Dean Milman refers to Bohlen, (das 

 alte Indien, p. 139 et seq.) who gives a long list of the festivals of the sun ; 

 and to Dr. Richard's valuable work on Egyptian Mythology ; on the Deification 

 of the Active and Passive Powers of Generation ; the marriage of the Sun 

 and the Earth, p. 40, and pp. 62—75, 



The writer cannot divest himself of the idea that, at Abury, a symbolical 

 representation was intended of the generative and fructifying powers of the 

 sun in its connection with the earth, the " irofifxriTop re yrj" apostrophized by 

 Prometheus, (Prom. Vinctus 90). 



