PREFACE. xi 



These same facts serve also to indicate his actual 

 epoch. Although, as De Eouge 1 has shown, very early 

 Egyptian monuments now at Berlin and elsewhere 

 express or insinuate the idea of the Eternal Father- 

 Creator, and of his Son begotten before the worlds, yet 

 the dogma of the Holy Trinity is, as we shall find, 

 expressed in far more categorical terms, and almost in 

 the very words of St. John, by our Hermes in his " Poem- 

 andres;" so also the doctrine of Baptism and the Begenera- 

 tion or new birth, as set forth by St. John in the third 

 chapter of his Gospel, as due to The Man, the only Son 

 of God. 



Asclepius was said to be the grandson of Hermes, and 

 the work which bears that name refers unmistakably to 

 times near to those of Constantine, when the ancient reli- 

 gion of Egypt was tottering to its fall. Moreover, that 

 author refers therein repeatedly to Ammonius Saccas, who 

 is called the founder of the Xeoplatonic School,, and who 

 died circa A.D. 241. On the other hand, the clear refer- 

 ence, by Justin Martyr, to the teaching of Hermes as to 

 the Unity of the Godhead, 2 and the identity, almost verbal, 

 of a passage in that Father with a passage in the " Poern- 

 andres," and the mention of him by Tertullian, demonstrate 

 that he wrote before or contemporaneously with the earlier 

 of these Fathers. Many of the works of our Hermes are 

 probably still entombed in the libraries on the Continent; 

 but those which have come to light, and are now trans- 

 lated, are most remarkable and of very considerable im- 

 portance, since they are the only treatises we possess of 

 the kind belonging to that epoch. The emphatic praise 

 bestowed upon them by the Fathers, from Justin Martyr 3 

 downwards, ought to commend them to our notice. The 

 eulogium of Lactantius, 4 " Trismegistus who, I know not 

 how, investigated almost all truth;" and as he and Cyril 



1 Etude sur le Rituel Funeraire des Egyptiens," " Revue Archec- 

 logique," 1860, p. 357 ; and see Rawlinson's Egypt, i. 320. 



2 See Part III., post. 3 See Part III., post. 

 4 " Divin. Instit.," iv. 9. 



