Page:Stirling William The Canon 1897.djvu/19

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PREFACE.
xiii

him either have cared not, or have dared not, push their theory to its conclusion.

The author of the present work has not been so deterred, and argues out his case with much precision and a wealth of figures, proving most clearly that the external measurements of almost every ancient temple, the figures of the New Jerusalem, Holy Oblation, and other temples, real and imaginary, reveal the magnitudes of the sun, moon, and other planets, together with the distance of their orbits. And most ingeniously he argues that, as all these calculations were, of necessity, impossible of comprehension to the vulgar, they were typified by symbols, the principal of all these symbols being the cross. Therefore it follows, in his opinion, that the rage of the so-called Reformers of the church was not a blind unreasoning fury, blended with a dislike to beauty, but a reasoning fury against a symbol that they understood. And he remarks, when speaking of the Puritans, whom he most justly stigmatizes as both "ridiculous and ignorant," that it was curious that, having cast away the cross, they should still retain the Christ, as both are one.

We know the mystic letters I. H. S., familiar from our childhood on altar fronts, embroidered in gold thread by pious ladies, were used as symbols of Bacchus, and venerated in his temples by the unreasoning but faithful worshipper just as they are with us.

Thor's hammer was a cross; the ruins of Palenque bear sculptured on their lintels the mystic symbol, and Bernal Diaz tells us that, in