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(p. 58)
THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GLORY
AND
THE EXPRESS IMAGE OF HIS
PERSON
HAVING got, either
in idea or in reality, subjectively in our consciousness or objectively in
history, a man whose character and career suggest to us the element of infinity
in power and goodness; and having by him discovered the capacity of our race
for attaining perfection, real or imagined, and having thereby won exemption
from eternal condemnation, how shall we give vent to our heart’s
promptings to adore him as a God, how institute divine worship in his honour?
Having a theology and a religion, worship inevitably follows.
Not
enough that we make him in the image of our own little best. As Son at once of
God and man, the universe contains no element too noble to be pressed into his
service, no symbol too exalted to be converted to his worship.
Here,
dull and unimaginative that we are, we should, if left
to our own resources, find ourselves at once brought to a standstill through
lack of a rule by which to fashion the expression of our adoration.
(p. 59)
It was not so in
the days of old when, not yet civilised and artificial, men lived in immediate
dependence upon the physical order of the universe. Buried in the streets of
towns, unconscious of the operations of nature on which our very existence
depends, and heeding the changes of the seasons chiefly for their effects on
our social life, we can little realise the vivid interest taken by primitive
peoples in the march of the sun, and in his varied yet regular operations
throughout the year. Not for us in these days is his rising
the daily advent, or the winter solstice the yearly birth, of a god. Inhabiting
a temperate climate, and sheltered in substantial dwellings, we dread not his
noonday rays as the darts of irresistible power; warmed by clothing and fire,
and cheered by artificial light, we hail not his victory over the cold and
darkness of winter as a rescue and redemption for ourselves; nor, nourished by
the commerce that flows from afar through a thousand artificial channels, do we
watch eagerly for the alternate beams and showers which alike proceed from him,
in fear or hope of starvation or plenty.
Surely,
if there be anywhere a visible manifestation of God which can be accepted as
‘the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person,’
it is in the kingly orb on which we depend utterly for light and life, and all
things needful to existence. What then but the sun can represent for us and
(p. 60)
suggest all
that we require in the way of symbolism and worship, when we would fulfil the
impulses which bid us adore the Perfection whereby we ourselves are made
perfect?
It
is the sun, then, that we must press into our service,
and not ours only, but his whom we delight to honour, if his worship is to
reach the supremest heights accessible to humanity.
You
have demanded of me the Keys of the Creeds. I gave you before the key to their
moral side, in the worship of perfection. I give you now the key to their
physical side. It is the worship of the sun. The sun and, as I have already
indicated, the organs of sex, are the fundamental symbols of every religious
worship known to us, each alike catholic in their acceptance, their necessity,
and their functions. It was impossible for me to enter fully into detail
respecting the second. Neither is it essential to my purpose to do so, seeing
that, although incorporated with the basis of ecclesiastical Christianity, and
discoverable by those who choose to search for it, it does not practically
affect either its doctrine or its ritual; its function being purely antiquarian
and æsthetic.
Far
otherwise is it with the sun, whose course to this day not only controls both
our secular and ecclesiastical calendars, and the character and times of the
festivals held in honour of Christ, but coincides
(p. 61)
with the
main circumstances narrated of his life, from his conception and birth to his
ascension and reception into heaven.
So
little is there strange and recondite in these facts, that it is a perpetual
marvel among the initiated how even the least incredulous of the laity contrive
to ignore them, – a marvel not unmixed with apprehension as to the result
that would follow from their becoming enlightened. The blind impetuosity, on
the other hand, with which Protestant sects indignantly denounce
‘idolatry,’ pagan or catholic, while themselves offering palpable
homage to the sun under the name of Christ, is to us a never-failing source of
amusement.
(p. 62)
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
The
rule was to personify the sun under the form of a benefactor to mankind, and to
narrate his annual career as a moral and philosophic tale. The Persian magians accounted to the populace for the introduction of
evil into the world by a fable of a serpent tempting the first woman to pluck a
forbidden apple. This act, as the apple ripens late in autumn, was of course
followed by the prevalence of winter, with darkness and cold – the
kingdom of the evil principle – and necessitated the adoption of
clothing. The mischief thus brought about could only be remedied by
(p. 63)
the agency
of the sun, whom they identified with the principle of good. Hence they
supposed the incarnation of the sun in the person of Mithra.
This Mithra was set forth as born of a virgin in a
cave at the winter solstice, and as accompanied by a retinue of twelve persons,
who represented the months. Having vanquished the prince of darkness, who under
guise of a serpent had seduced the woman, and having lost his life in the
contest, Mithra descended into hell – or under
side of the earth – and at the spring equinox rose again and ascended
into heaven, opening to man the gates of light and redeeming him from the
oppression of the evil one.
Mithra was represented as born of a virgin because the
constellation Virgo was on the horizon at the time of the sun’s birth.
And because the sun was then in the sign of Aries – then known as the
Lamb – at the vernal equinox, which governs the year, Mithra
was called the Lamb of God, and the Lamb that takes away the evils of the
world. The serpent that causes all the mischief by bringing in the winter is
Scorpio, the constellation of the later autumn.
Zoroaster,
the reputed author of the sacred books called the Zend-Avesta, where
this system of theogony is found, is variously
reckoned to have lived from one to six thousand years before the Christian era.
He was a pure and ardent monotheist, but compelled by way of solving the
problem of evil
(p. 64)
to
ascribe a dual nature to deity. Like all the great men of antiquity, from being
an historical he grew into a dogmatical personage,
– an immediate emanation from the supreme Being.
Such was Alexander; such Plato, who was said to be the child of Apollo, and
born of a virgin named Perictione. Ariston, who was betrothed to her, postponed his marriage
because Apollo appeared to him in a dream and told him that she was with child.
Genius was for the ancients ever associated with a divine origin.
The
religion founded in honour of Mithra was provided
with the sacraments of baptism, penance, the eucharist, consecration, and others. Its novices were
subjected to a severely ascetic regime. Chastity and virginity were accounted sacred;
and it contained the doctrines of the Fall, the
Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection.
Passing
to
(p. 65)
actual birth
to the Gospels, and which gradually paled and died out before the ascendancy of
Christianity.
Already
will you have perceived in the coincidences between the histories of these
Sun-gods and that of the Christ of the calendar and creeds, evidences that the
same compulsion which dominated the expression of the pagan faiths controlled
also the Christian. The surprise you confess at the notion of there being any
coincidence between the festivals of the Church and the solar phenomena would
have been astounding to me, but that a long experience of the determined
blindness of ordinary Christian folk, where an account of their faith is
concerned, and of their utter indifference to its truth, has taught me to be
surprised at nothing in that relation.
To
no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton the world owes both the first suggestion
that the Christian festivals were determined upon an astronomical basis, and a
detailed list of instances of correspondence. Even he, however, resolutely
closed his eyes to the inevitable inference; and like his great brother in
science, Faraday, declined to submit the basis of his faith to the test of his
understanding.
The
day assigned to the birth of the Sun-god of all the other religions was the
same as that assigned, without a particle of historical evidence, by the Church
to Christ. The shortest day being December 21, his birthday is put on the
twenty-fifth, the
(p. 66)
first day that
shows any elongation, and which is therefore the actual commencement of the
year; while the twenty-first, on which the sun reaches its lowest point, when
his worshippers are supposed to be filled with alarm lest their lord and master
fail to rise again, is assigned to the doubting apostle Thomas. In the
corresponding worship in
Well,
Christmas has come, and the sun is born; but winter has still a long career to
run, and consequently, the sun, as yet a feeble infant, has to undergo a series
of struggles with the powers of darkness. And so, just as we find the infant
Christ exposed to the perils celebrated on Innocents’ Day, we find the
various representatives of the sun with difficulty and danger emerging into
childhood. In the case of the Hindu deity, Crishna,
who was cradled among shepherds, and greeted at his birth by an angelic chorus,
a massacre of children was ordered by a jealous king, in exact correspondence
with the slaughter afterwards ascribed to Herod. In every case, however, the
Sun-god escapes all dangers, and grows in stature and in favour with God and
man, the days gradually gaining on the nights as he rises higher above the
horizon, until the spring equinox, when they are equal.
This
period of equality constitutes in all the solar religions a serious crisis in
the god’s history, and it
(p. 67)
becomes an
anxious question for his adorers whether he on whom their very existence
depends will still be able to make good his way against the powers of darkness;
or whether the world will be thrust back into the region of winter, and never
more see sweet summer skies.
For
a time things seem to go against him, and mankind are
in despair. The change to the southwest rainy monsoon brings equinoctial storms
which hide the sun from their sight. He has succumbed to his foe. They fast
long and mourn him dead. But being a god he cannot be holden
of death. Nay, by his dying he shall prove himself to be conqueror over death,
and his very death shall be a blessing and redemption for the nations; for the
rains by which the sun has been obscured are essential to the life of the
eastern world.
Thus
hope returns, and despair is changed to joy, as from a point still higher in
the heavens than that at which he had disappeared, he shines out with new and
greater effulgence. His rising is followed by his final triumph and continued
ascent towards the zenith, his kingdom of heaven, whence, in the heat and
fruitfulness of summer, he sends down sustenance and comfort for men.
But
during the equinoctial period of the sun’s rising and ascension he is in
the constellation of the Lamb, as Aries used
to be called. This also is his
(p. 68)
time to pass over the
equinoctial line from the southern tropic to ours. Now does the orb of day
begin to attain his full powers. Thus, in the
Apocalypse we find the Lamb adored in the presence of the throne by four living
creatures, the cardinal constellations of the heavens, and twenty-four elders
or hours, who fall down before him, crying, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was
slain, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and
glory, and blessing.’ For the symbolism of the Apocalypse, that sublime
hymn of invective against
Not
less susceptible of a solar interpretation are the miracles ascribed to Christ.
Thus the conversion of water into wine represents the formation of the juice of
the grape out of the rains by the sun’s action. The production of food,
as in the extraordinary draught of fishes and the feeding of the five thousand,
illustrates the sun’s fertilising influence on land and water. In the
stilling of the tempest we have an example of the dependence of the weather on
the sun. It is the sun that, by affording light, gives sight to the eye. He is
the
(p. 69)
universal healer
of disease, able by darting his rays afar to impart renewed vitality at a
distance, as in the cases of the nobleman’s son and centurion’s
servant. He it is that raises from the dead to new life the body buried in the
ground. While in the blasting of the barren fig-tree we see the blighting
effect of the sun’s heat on a feeble and
rootless vegetation.
The
rule in the calendar is to dedicate to some apostle the day of the sun’s
entry into a new sign. And – as pointed out by
The
notable part played by the constellation Virgo in the celestial scheme could
not fail to procure its
(p. 70)
identification with
the ideal woman of the new dispensation. Osiris, Mithra, Bacchus, Christ, are all
represented as having been born at the moment of midnight, between Christmas
eve and Christmas day, in a cave or stable. At this moment the constellation
Virgo is cut exactly in half by the eastern horizon, the sun itself being
beneath the earth in the sign of Capricorn; or Stable of Augeas,
the cleansing of which constituted one of the labours of Hercules – who
also represented the sun. Justin Martyr boasts that Christ was born when the
sun takes its birth in the Stable of Augeas, coming
as a second Hercules to cleanse a foul world. The appearance of the celestial
Virgin above the horizon at this time is thus indicated in the third Rosary:
‘Let us contemplate how the B. V. M., when the time of her delivery was
come, brought forth our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, at midnight, and
laid him in a manger.’ And Eusebius says
he was born underground.
Even
the names assigned by gospel or legend to the grandparents of Christ, on the
mother’s side, seem to bear a solar signification; Heli being
a contraction of the Greek Helios, the sun; and Anna the
feminine of Annus, the
year. And it so happens that, July 26, the day devoted to the latter in the
calendar, was the new year’s day of ancient
Returning
to the Virgin herself, we find that the Church celebrates her Assumption
‘into the heavenly
(p. 71)
chamber in
which the King of kings sits on his starry seat,’ on August 15. This is
exactly the time of the disappearance of the zodiacal constellation Virgo, called
by the Greeks Astræa. And
the period during which the constellation is so wholly absorbed in the
brightness of the sun’s rays as to be invisible in the heavenly field, is
seven days, – or the period during which Miriam (or Mary), the virgin of
the Old Testament, was compelled to hide her leprous face in the camp of
Israel. Three weeks pass ere the sun has moved sufficiently to allow the entire
constellation to be seen. The day on which Virgo’s head
emerges from his rays – September 8 – is the day appointed for the
nativity of the B. V. M.
The
sun’s place at the vernal equinox is not now in Aries, as it
was at the beginning of our era, but has moved on to Pisces. It was
previously in Taurus. The shifting of
the zodiac by a sign occupies, 2151 years. It is thus that while Mithraism, Osirisism, and, following them, Judaism, had the bull and
the lamb, the ‘golden calf’ and ‘paschal lamb,’ for
their symbols, Christianity adopted the lamb and the fish.
The
division of the sun’s path among the stars, into the constellations which
form the Zodiac, was made and known throughout the East, and dominated its
religious myths, at a period so remote that Ptolemy declared it hopeless even
in his time to seek for its origin.
(p. 72)
THE APOSTASY
THUS, for both the
worshippers of the solar deity and for those of Christ the same ‘cardinal
doctrines’ of the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Death, Resurrection,
and Ascension, held equally good. And the fact is indisputable that
neither the claim raised for Jesus as being the Messiah of the Jews, nor that
of being the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh, of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, of whom I will tell you by and by, nor even
the fierce denunciations of eternal tortures against all who did not believe in
him, and the assurance of salvation for all who did, would have secured for him
popular recognition and acceptance in the absence of his identification with
the sun, and therefore as the legitimate successor of Mithra,
Osiris, Adonis, and all the numerous other human
forms under which the sun was worshipped.
Not
among the populace only did the principle of the old religion thus retain its
vitality, but many strenuous attempts were made by influential persons to
restore it to supremacy. Among these was a
(p. 73)
notable
attempt made by the imperial family of Severus,
especially by the female members of it, instigated no doubt by the priesthood
of the decaying faith. Jealous of the Jewish Christ, and perceiving the
necessity of a new incarnation to restore the prestige of their religion, these
princesses sought to elevate Apollonius of Tyana, a
remarkable character, said to have lived during the whole of the first century,
to the desired place, and to that end claimed for him the distinction of being
the latest incarnation of the solar deity.
The worship of Christ as a god, continued, however, to gain ground
against all competitors; until at length the power, moral, political, and
ecclesiastical of the system as a religion, made it expedient for the State to
recognise it and incorporate it with itself. And thus it came that under
Constantine Christianity was erected into a complete system combining all that
was essential and vital in the systems it was called on to supplant.
I
have shown you the correspondences between the course of the sun and the
histories ascribed to the various personages in whom he was held to have been
incarnate, and those of Christ. The authoritative promulgation of the Nicene
Creed by the Council presided over by the politic
(p. 74)
are set forth in
this document as of the essence of God, ‘maker of heaven and earth and of
all things visible and invisible,’ through the agency of his ‘only
begotten Son,’ – the grand orb in which for us all light and life
giving warmth are centred and expressed, which may further be said to be
begotten of the supreme source of things, – ‘the Father, before all
worlds, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father: by whom all
things were made’ as agent for the Father, even all terrestrial life, by
the action of the solar rays on the earth’s crust. Then we have the
sun’s annual history. ‘Who for us men and for our salvation’
from death by the cold and darkness of winter, ‘came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost,’ the wind, or atmosphere. For to the
ancients the course of the sun lay, not above and beyond, but through the atmosphere,
the breathing of which is essential to life, while its movement, or wind, is
directly due to the influence of the sun’s heat.
But
the Holy Ghost must have a spouse, by whom to produce the human expression of
the Only-begotten. To the warm winds of spring breathing on the surface of
earth, ‘the frolic wind that breathes the spring,’ is due all life,
vegetable and animal; and from them the earth, ever virgin, receives her
impregnation, at the season accorded by the Church to the annunciation of the Virgin
Mary – the spring
(p. 75)
equinox
– precisely nine months before Christmas day.
So
the sun is made man, and in man’s form undergoes on earth the
vicissitudes to which he is subject in the heavens. He ‘suffers
death’ on a machine universally regarded as an emblem of life and symbol
of the sexual order of nature. ‘He is buried’ out of sight, as is
his prototype during the spring storms and rains. But not for
long. For presently ‘he rises again, and ascends into
heaven,’ mounting higher and higher as midsummer approaches, and takes
the post of honour ‘on the right hand of the Father’ of Light, as
supreme arbiter of life and death, or ‘judge of quick and dead;’
– for the sun has but to withdraw his rays and the world is wrapped in
death; to restore them and it blossoms into life: – ‘whose kingdom
shall have no end.’
The
Nicene creed was composed at two different times, for
two special objects. The first part belongs to the Council of Nice, and was
written to condemn the doctrine of Arius, who
affirmed Christ to be a mere creature, though the first of creatures, and not
of the substance of the Father. The second portion, with the exception of the
phrase ‘and the Son,’ was written half a century afterwards, to
define the nature and functions of the Holy Ghost in opposition to the teaching
of Macedonius. The attempt to define these things at
all, and still more the imposition
(p. 76)
of them
by authority, have been fraught with mischief incalculable to mankind, and will
never cease to be so until mankind is brought to see the real nature of the
contention, and the unpractical character of the subject. Even now eastern and
western Christendom are hopelessly divided on the question of the procession of
the Holy Ghost. The Nicene creed, in virtue of a later
addition, takes the western side, and affirms his double procession from the
Father and the Son, a development in which the eastern Church declines to
follow it. Seeing that the wind, personified by the third person of the
Trinity, is due alike to the universal principle of light and life, that is, to
the Father; and to the sun, in whom he takes visible form, the Nicene creed as
we have it, is manifestly in the right. So that by the solar
analogy as well as by that of sex, the doctrine of the single procession of the
Holy Ghost shows itself to be untenable.
Let
me again remind you that these two provinces of nature have suggested the
matter or controlled the expression of every system of theology the world has
seen. So that the Nicene creed will hold good of all incarnations whatever
until the world gives practical recognition to the facts long since proclaimed
to it by astronomical science. For, so far from descending and dying and rising
again, and undergoing the other changes on which the theologies are built,
(p. 77)
the sun
remains fixed in the centre of the solar system, and the whole of the phenomena
of the seasons are due to a change of position in the axis of the earth itself.
To this you must add the consideration that as ours is but one of an innumerable
host of suns and systems, whatever theological system we assign to one, we must
assign to all, allowing only for local peculiarities.
Of
the peculiar value attached to the atmosphere by the Orientals, and therefore
of the importance of the personification of that element in their theological
systems, we can judge from the fact that the Sanscrit
root of the word for God in the Latin, Greek, and other derived tongues,
signifies equally breath. The
Greek Pneuma, and
the Sanscrit Div, the
root of deity and divine, have an identical meaning in the air. The
world was supposed to live by a process of breathing, and the thoughts of
men’s minds were regarded as inspired together with
their breath.
But
on whatever ground Christianity obtained acceptance as the new rule of faith,
whether from pagans as constituting a new form of sun-and-sex worship; from
Jews as the fulfilment of the Law and Prophets, and the reign of the Messiah;
or from philosophers as a complement to metaphysics, in that it seemed to
demonstrate what metaphysics had only postulated, and by a practical instance
to bridge the gulf between the finite and the infinite; whether,
(p. 78)
again, it obtained
acceptance from the masses in virtue of the supernatural physical powers with
which Christ, in common with all the other Sun-gods, was credited; from
moralists, through their recognising in the teaching ascribed to Christ a
standard of conduct of absolute perfection; or from theologians, on the ground
of his proclaiming the spiritual nature of God and his own identity therewith,
and living consistently with such claim; – in no case does the rule fail
to hold good, that in exalting him into a god, all these classes but exalted
that which they deemed best in humanity, and so made God in their own image,
only divested of limitations.
If
proof were wanted of the affection still entertained in the fourth century for
the old religion, and of the moral advance made by men through the
contemplation of a life of earnestness, purity, and unselfishness, such as was
presented to them of Christ, we have it in the attempt of Julian to undo the
work of Constantine and reinstate paganism. Constantine, an ardent worshipper
of the sun, whom he chose to be his tutelar deity,
adopted on the grandest scale the principle of ‘concurrent
endowment,’ and established Christianity in connection with sun worship.
Julian, similarly devoted, sought to reestablish sun
worship in connection with Christianity. That is, he wished to retain the old
creed and ritual under their true and original forms, but with
(p. 79)
the additional
spirituality, morality, simplicity, and purity acquired by the recent
generations from the contemplation of a life that was beautiful all round; a life
which the Jewish Christians had learnt, under Neoplatonic
influences, to regard as that of the incarnate Logos, or the Word made flesh,
of their Jehovah; but which the rest of the world insisted on regarding as a
new and more noble incarnation of the sun.
Both
sides could adduce what must have seemed to them irresistible reasons for their
views. The Pagan could point triumphantly to the heavens for the visible origin
and sustainer of life, who already in the persons of Crishna, Mithra, Osiris, Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, Adonis, and many others,
had condescended to man’s estate to redeem mankind from evil.
And
the Jew, whose temperament and history disposed him to lay the principal stress
on the moral side of things, could point to his Law, with its strenuous insistance on perfect physical purity: to his prophets,
with their ardent inculcation of spiritual perfection: and now to his Christ,
with his fulfilment of the requirements of both as the translator of all
perfection from the abstract into the concrete, from the infinite into the
finite, the ideal into the real, God into Man.
Viewed
in this relation the story of the Transfiguration
(p. 80)
possesses a
profound significance. In it we have Christ, taking Peter, John, and James,
representing respectively zeal, love, and works, for his witnesses, and meeting
Moses and Elias, the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, ‘in
glory.’ In the company of these two he is recognised by a divine voice as
the ‘beloved Son of God,’ the fulfilment and completion of the
dispensations represented by Moses and Elias, resuming in himself all the
perfections contemplated by them, and constituting therefore a satisfactory
solution of the problem their supersession had been
to the Jewish mind.
It
is true that the occurrence is alluded to only in the three Gospels which are
of exclusively Jewish origin, and is not mentioned in the Epistle ascribed to
James, nor in the fourth Gospel, which bears the name of John, nor in his
Epistles. The omission as regards John is important as an indication that the
fourth Gospel was the work not of any dweller in
