6 i A Note on Boodhism and the Cave 



worship of the symbol and of the offering, to the entire forget- 

 fulness of the true God. It became necessary at last that mankind 

 should be recalled to the purity of an early faith ; and the injunction, 

 that, as God is a Spirit, therefore he is to be worshipped in spirit and 

 in truth — stands a record as well of the truthfulness of the premises, 

 as the logical soundness of the deduction on which is based the prin- 

 ple of the reformation introduced by the Great Founder of our 

 Faith. 



But it is singular to remark, that this inclination, inherent in 

 human nature, to realise by substantialising the idea of a God, acted 

 differently in the two families which we have under review. The 

 Semitic Nations appear never to have entirely lost sight of the view 

 of an individual God or Gods through all their symbols. Whether 

 as Sabseans they worshipped the Sun and Moon and the starry Host, 

 they were still identified in their minds as individuals either through 

 the means of their supposed regents — or as exercising individual in- 

 fluences on mankind ; the same was the case with the deification 

 of ancestral heroes, gods and demi-gods, as obtained in Antient 

 Greece and Rome. If adorers of the regenerative powers of Nature, 

 they never lost sight of their individualities, and marshalled them- 

 selves as worshippers of the male or female power. The Hamite 

 family on the other hand perhaps from being of a more enquiring 

 caste of mind soon became skeptic ; they at first doubted and then 

 disbelived the existence of a creating God, a Demi-urge. The 

 first question that they seemed to have asked themselves was ; if 

 there is a being who created every thing, space, and matter, where 

 was he, in what medium did he exist, before he began to create 

 — when nothing was ? They soon got deeper in metaphysical 

 wisdom (Boodhism) till lost in a perfect maze of subtle intricacies 

 and wire- drawn distinctions. Still however with them the sym- 

 bolising and materialising propensities of human nature were at 

 work, if they were unable to exercise this influence in endeavouring 

 to symbolise or materialise the idea of a God, they did so with 

 metaphysical principles and mental qualities, &c. Their first sym- 

 bols, as must strike every one, were necessarily numbers, for, if they 

 considered that such and such, and so many metaphysical principles, 

 or such and such, and so many mental qualities existed in the Mun- 



