be discovered that this powerful and beneficent agent, the solar fire, was the most potent destroyer, and hence would arise the first idea of a Creator and Destroyer united in the same person. But much time would not elapse before it must have been observed, that the destruction caused by this powerful being was destruction only in appearance, that destruction was only reproduction in another form—regeneration; that if he appeared sometimes to destroy, he constantly repaired the injury which he seemed to occasion—and that, without his light and heat, every thing would dwindle away into a cold, inert, unprolific mass.[1] Thus at once, in the same being, became concentrated, the creating, the preserving, and the destroying powers,—the latter of the three being, at the same time, both the destroyer and regenerator. Hence, by a very natural and obvious train of reasoning, arose the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer—in India, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; in Persia, Oromasdes, Mithra, and Arimanius; in Egypt, Osiris, Neith, and Typhon: in each case Three Persons and one God. And thus arose the Trimurti, or the celebrated Trinity. On this Mr. Payne Knight says, “The hypostatical division and essential unity of the Deity is one of the most remarkable parts of this system, and the farthest removed from common sense and reason: and yet this is perfectly reasonable and consistent, if considered together with the rest of it, for the emanations and personifications were only figurative abstractions of particular modes of action and existence, of which the primary cause and original essence still continued one and the same. The three hypostases being thus only one being, each hypostasis is occasionally taken for all, as is the case in the passage of Apuleius before cited, where Isis describes herself as the universal deity.”[2]
The sun himself, in his corporeal and visible form of a globe of fire, I do not doubt was, for a long time, the sole trinity. And it would not be till after ages of speculation and philosophizing that man would raise his mind to a more pure trinity, or to a trinity of abstractions,—a trinity which would probably never have existed in his imagination if he had not first had the more gross corporeal igneous trinity, with its effects, for its prototype, to lead him to the more refined and sublime doctrine, in which the corporeal and igneous trinity gave way among philosophers to one of a more refined kind; or to a system of abstractions, or of attributes, or of emanations, from a superior being, the creator and preserver of the sun himself.
It has been said in reply to this, Then this fundamental doctrine on which, in fact, all the future religion and philosophy of the world was built, you attribute to accident! The word accident means, by us unseen or unknown cause; but I suppose, that when an intelligent Being was establishing the present order of the universe, he must know how the unseen cause or accident which he provided would operate,—this accident or unseen cause being only a link in a chain, the first link of which begins, and the last of which ends, in God.
That the sublime doctrine of emanations, or abstractions as it was called, above alluded to, prevailed among the oriental nations, cannot be doubted; but yet there may be a doubt whether they were ever entirely free from an opinion that the creative Deity consisted of a certain very refined substance, similar, if not the same, as the magnetic, galvanic, or electric fluid. This was the opinion of all the early Christian fathers, as well, I think, as of the Grecians. But still, I think, certain philosophers arose above this kind of materialism, among whom must have been the Buddhists and Brahmins of India; but of this we shall see more in the sequel. We shall find this a most difficult question to decide.
- ↑ Described in Genesis by the words תהו ובהו tëu-u-bëu, which mean a mass of matter effete, unproductive, unprolific, ungenerating, and itself devoid of the beautiful forms of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms,—the mud or Ιλυς of Sanchoniathon. The words of our Bible, as here used, without form and void, have not any meaning.
- ↑ Knight, p. 163.
