Page:Philosophical and scriptural proofs that brutes have souls as well as men.pdf/8

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

8

Brutes went all to one place," and that "there was no distinction." And in order to remove every doubt respecting the opinions of Moses being indentified with those of the heathen theologians,—we give the following passage from the learned Geographer and Philosopher Strabo:

"Moses, who was one of the Egyptian priests, taught his followers, that it was an egregious error to represent the Deity under the form of animals, as the Egyptians did, or in the shape of man, as was the practise of the Greeks and Africans. That alone is the Deity, said he, which constitutes heaven, earth, and every living thing; that which we call the world, the sum of all things, nature; and no reasonable person will think of representing such a being by the image of any one of the objects around us. It is for this reason, that, rejecting every species of images or idols, Moses wished the Deity to be worshipped without emblems, and according to his proper nature; he accordingly ordered a temple worthy of him to be erected, &c." Geograh, lia. 16. p. 1104.

The theology of Moses has, been, different in no respect from that of his followers, that is to say, from that of the Stoics and Epicureans, who consider the Deity as the soul of the world. This philosophy appears to have taken birth, or to have been disseminated when Abraham came into Egypt (200 years before Moses,) since he quitted his system of idols for that of the God Yahouh; so that we may place its pro-