Again he says, “To the great Triad of the Gentiles, thus springing from a Monad, was ascribed the creation of the world, or rather its renovation after each intervening deluge. It was likewise supposed to be the governing power and the intellectual soul of the universe. In short, all the attributes of Deity were profanely ascribed to it. This has led many to imagine that the Pagans did fundamentally worship the true God, and that even from the most remote antiquity they venerated the Trinity in Unity.”[1]
Thus it is evident, from the Rev. Mr. Faber’s admission, that a Being called a Trinity, three persons and one God, was worshiped by all the ancient nations of the earth. He very properly says to the same class we must ascribe the triads of the Orphic, Pythagorean, and Platonic schools.
The school of Plato has been generally looked to for the origin of the Christian Trinity, but, as we have seen, it would be more correct to look to the oracles of Zoroaster. Christianity may have drawn from Platonism, but there can be no doubt that Plato had drawn from the oracles of the East. The Second Mind, or the Regenerator, correctly the Holy Ghost, was in the oracles of Zoroaster, and will be shewn to have been in the baptismal service of the Magi. And “the many” to whom Mr. Faber alludes, as believing that the Gentiles venerated the Trinity in Unity, believed what was perfectly true. There can be no doubt that the Heathens adored the Trinity before the Christians, and did not copy it from Christianity. If either copied, the Christians must have copied from their Heathen predecessors. But all this has a strong tendency to prove, that what Ammonius Saccas said was true, namely, that the religions of the Christians and the Gentiles were the same, when stripped of the meretricious ornaments with which the craft of priests had loaded them.
8. Before I quit the subject of the Persian doctrines it may not be irrelevant again to observe, that the ancient philosophers, meditating upon the nature of the universe, and confining their theories and systems to the knowledge which they derived from experience or through the medium of their senses, the only mode by which knowledge or ideas can be acquired, discovered that they had no experience of the destruction of matter; that when it appears to the superficial observer to be destroyed, it has only changed its mode of existence; that what we call destruction, is only reproduction or regeneration. On this account it is that we always find the Destroyer united with the Creator, and also with the Preserver or Saviour, as one person. Upon this curious philosophical and very true principle, an infinite variety of fictions have been invented, by the sportive genius of poets, or the craft of priests. But the simple philosophical principle was at the bottom of them all; and it was that only which philosophers believed. God only knows whither the vanity of the moderns has carried them, or will carry them; but the ancients confined their wisdom or knowledge, in this instance at least, within the compass of their ideas—the limit of real knowledge; and as, in their present state of existence, they could not receive the idea of the annihilation of matter through the medium of the senses, they could not form an idea of it at all; and consequently could not receive as an article of faith that of which they must necessarily remain in profound ignorance. Matter might be created from nothing, or it might not be created; their senses told them it existed; but to them it was unknown whether it had ever not existed; and they did not pretend to decide, as an article of faith, the question—for in its very nature it was not possible to decide it by human means. Not so the wise Christian: he and his priest laugh at the ignorance of the ancient philosopher; and at once declare that matter was created; and that they have a perfect idea respecting its creation, which they can by no possibility have received from experience, or through the medium of the senses. With the ancient philosopher the Author confesses his ignorance. The Oriental philosopher, who penned the first verse of
- ↑ Book vi. Ch. ii. p. 471.
