former is pure, subtile ether, or Divine Spirit; the other entirely inert in itself till united with the active principle. That the Divine Spirit acting upon matter produced fire, water, earth, and air; and that it is the sole efficient principle by which all nature is moved. The Stoics, like the Hindu sages, believed in the final absorption. St. Justin believed in the emanation of these souls from Divinity, and Tatian, the Assyrian, his disciple, declared that "man was as immortal as God himself." *
That profoundly significant verse of the Genesis, "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, I gave a living soul, . . . ." should arrest the attention of every Hebrew scholar capable of reading the Scripture in its original, instead of following the erroneous translation, in which the phrase reads, "wherein there is life." †
From the first to the last chapters, the translators of the Jewish Sacred Books misconstrued this meaning. They have even changed the spelling of the name of God, as Sir W. Drummond proves. Thus El, if written correctly, would read Al, for it stands in the original אל—Al, and, according to Higgins, this word means the god Mithra, the Sun, the preserver and savior. Sir W. Drummond shows that Beth-El means the House of the Sun in its literal translation, and not of God. "El, in the composition of these Canaanite names, does not signify Deus, but Sol." ‡Thus Theology has disfigured ancient Theosophy, and Science ancient Philosophy.§
For lack of comprehension of this great philosophical principle, the methods of modern science, however exact, must end in nullity. In no one branch can it demonstrate the origin and ultimate of things. Instead of tracing the effect from its primal source, its progress is the reverse. Its higher types, as it teaches, are all evolved from antecedent lower ones. It starts from the bottom of the cycle, led on step by step in the great labyrinth of nature by a thread of matter. As soon as this breaks and the clue is lost, it recoils in affright from the Incomprehensible, and
* See Turner; also G. Higgins's "Anacalypsis."
† Genesis, i, 30.
‡ Sir William Drummond: "Œdipus Judicus," p. 250.
§ The absolute necessity for the perpetration of such pious frauds by the early fathers and later theologians becomes apparent, if we consider that if they had allowed the word Al to remain as in the original, it would have become but too evident—except for the initiated—that the Jehovah of Moses and the sun were identical. The multitudes, which ignore that the ancient hierophant considered our visible sun but as an emblem of the central, invisible, and spiritual Sun, would have accused Moses—as many of our modern commentators have already done—of worshipping the planetary bodies; in short, of actual Zabaism
