NOTES ON BROWN'S DICTIONARY OF

THE BIBLE.

AARON.

"Aaron and Hur attended Moses to the top of the adjacent hill and held up his hands, &c."

SHOULD we understand this literally, or does it imply that Moses, when faint in prayer, had his spirit renewed by the united petitions of Aaron and Hur ?

"Some good authors think the story of the heathen Mercury to have been hammered out of Aaron's; but may we not with far more edification consider him as a personal type of Jesus Christ?"

Of all pious absurdities, I think that of converting the Scripture characters into Grecian gods and heroes the most preposterous. Wherein consists the identity of Aaron and Hermes? Aaron had a rod converted into a serpent. Mercury also bore a rod or caduceus with serpents twisted about it. Aaron was eloquent. Hermes is the orator of Olympus. It is better to pursue the parallel no farther.

Doubtless Aaron, as priest, typified the mediatorial office of Christ; but all the other correspondences are false or forced. But the desire to find Christ not only in all the law and all the prophets, but in all the favoured persons of the Old Testament, though overstrained, is an error on the safe side, very different from finding Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid in the Bible.*

* Though I reject as dangerous dallying with a serious subject that strange fancy of certain commentators, which finds the roots of all mythologies in Scripture history, makes Jephthah's daughter into Iphigenia, Mercury into Aaron, Bacchus into Moses and Noah, Isis into the Ark, and will have it that the Iliad and Odyssey are plagiarisms from the Bible,-I think it undeniable that the Greeks, and in later times the Romans, appropriated and localised every tale and tradition, whether derived from the original settlers, or gathered in their intercourse with other nations, and identified the astronomical and pantheistic gods of the Egyptians and Orientals with their local heroes. How otherwise can we account for the many Jupiters, Venuses, Dianas, Herculeses, &c., which furnish so fair a topic for Cicero's sceptical Cotta? In like manner our own ancestors formed their romantic mythology,-their cycles of heroes, Round Tables, &c.; and told the same story a hundred ways, varying the scene and circumstance to the desire of their nationality, and not seldom Gothicising the old Greek and Roman legends. Almost every fiction has its duplicate or triplicate. Isis became Io, and Ceres Diana and Proserpine. The wanderings and lamentations of Isis for her husband were transformed into Ceres' endless search for her daughter. Tammuz, yearly wounded, communicated his attributes to a fair youth of Cyprus. The mermaid Atargatis of Syria helped to metamorphose sea-born Aphrodite into a fish in the Giant's War. Sometimes the tale is stolen without any alteration but of name. Thus Nisus and Pterelaus have each a yellow lock of immortality, which is cut off by their respective daughters, Scylla and Cometho. This must remind one of Samson. Danae intrusts her Perseus, Auge her Telephus, to an ark on the ocean: some say Bacchus was preserved in the same manner. Nor are those parallels, of which Plutarch wrote a book, confined to fable. The tale of Damon and Pythias is told by Polyænus of Evephenus and Eucritus; Dionysius is the tyrant in both cases. Perillus was not the sole patentee of the Brazen Bull; but Newton and Leibnitz (was it not?) both discovered fluxions, and Priestley and Lavoisier both decomposed water. The story of the Horatii and Curiatii, with the murder of the sister, is related of a certain Critolaus of Tegea, who fell in the battle at Thermopyla, between Antiochus and the Romans. I find that the imitators of Phalaris and Perillus were Emylius Censorinus, Tyrant of Ægista, and Aruntius Paterculus, who was baked in the Brazen Horse himself had made. From one of the Author's Note Books.

ON HEATHEN TRADITIONS.

METIS, i. e., Counsel, was said to be the first wife of Zeus. Apollodorus informs us that she gave Saturn an emetic which made him disgorge his children whom he had swallowed. Hyginus, I believe it is, asserts, that her worthy husband eat her in the first month of her pregnancy, for fear she should produce a child wiser than its father. The thunder-god had sore need to be apprehensive of his offspring, seeing how he and his sire before him obtained the monarchy of heaven; but this foreboding had as little or as ill an effect on his morals as the equally reasonable alarms of the Malthusians on their disciples of the present day. These Mú0o may be allegorical, but they do not say much for that exquisite purity of taste which we are told our youth are to derive from the classic writers; neither do they testify that beautiful imagination which has half paganised many scholars, and persuaded some almost to regard Christianity as a vulgarising destructive,—a puritan iconoclast. Unquestionably the genius of Greece was beautiful. Doubtless her intellect was subtle and powerful as the lightning. Her sages had a passionate, a love-sick yearning after ideal truth, which they strove in vain to body forth in the gross material of worldly policy. But whatever of beauty or of moral wisdom the poets or the philosophers infused into the popular religion, was an inscititious graft, a light, a hue and radiance like that of the sun reflected on

the everlasting front of the Alps and Andes, which fails to fertilise what it illumines. Writers on mythology have not been sufficiently careful to separate what was in its origin poetical or philosophichowever it may have gained common credence in process of time-from the traditional groundwork of polytheism, or, rather, Hylozoism on the one hand, and the commemorative-symbolic mystic ceremonies of the sacerdotal religion on the other. Many of the popular fancies—and those the most pleasing

-were no more properly religious, not more essential portions of Hellenic heathenism, than the ordeals, judicial combats, the giants, dragons, and fairies of mediæval romance were portions even of monastic Christianity. The priests availed themselves of both, but neither heathenism nor popery were involved in either. The allegoric figments of the Pythagoreans and Platonists have their correlatives in the Rosicrucian and Paracelsian inventions of the 16th and 17th centuries. To the sacerdotal craft and to the quackeries of Egypt and Syria I ascribe most of what is obscene, bestial, and bloody in the ancient worship; though there is sad evidence how much the minds of the poets themselves were polluted and sensualised by the contamination of an idolatry adapted to the worst part of human nature, the corruption by which mankind are made slaves to the vilest of their sinful species. Fables like this of Metis, of Erichthonius, &c., very closely resemble some of the foul conceits of the Rabbins, adopted by Mohammed, probably to conciliate the Judaised

Arabs. Those filthy dreamers hid their doctrine, as beetles wrap their eggs, in dung.

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Between the true words of God and all creeds of human invention, you will find this striking difference. The truth is ever purest at the source; nothing can be added or taken away without impairing its excellence. Whereas, falsehood is corrupt at the fountain; muddy, salt, and pestilential and whatever of beauty or seeming good appears in heathen systems, is superinduced by the endeavours of men-not wholly evil-to accommodate their belief to their reason and kindlier affections. But the polluted stream never can run itself wholly clean; nor can all the freshness of tributary rills, derived from the ancient mountains of righteousness, do more than disguise, not correct, its aboriginal poison. Whereas, the river of Heaven, whatever swamps it may be constrained to traverse in its course-whatever drains and sewers may discharge their tribute of city-bred uncleanness into its channels

-whatever dirty trades may be exercised on its banks-though it be even compelled to turn the huge factories of worldliness-urges onward to eternity, overbearing all the moles and dams constructed to arrest its speed, or make profit of its power, and depositing every unwholesome and extraneous mixture, is continually regaining the bright transparency and life-bestowing sweetness wherewith it issues from beneath the throne of God.

"None are all evil." Man is, necessarily, originally sinful; and, alas! he is daily sinning. Yet,

VOL. II.

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