II. captives, driven from the homes which had been CHAP. long preserved to them as by a miracle of mercy, and succumbing under the terrific curse which lighted on the wandering Cain. As contemplated by Ezekiel, the whole Hebrew race were going backward; they were exiles in a moral desert, in the wilderness of the people;' they were forfeiting the vantage-ground on which their fathers had been planted, and, abandoned to the grasp of a blaspheming power, were melting fast away into the heathen multitudes by whom they were surrounded. And the cause of this disastrous retrogression was declared to be the preference which the Israelite himself had manifested for all heathenish modes of thought. His craven wish had been to lose his sacred nationality and so to be commingled and confounded with the world. 'We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries, to serve wood and stone' (xx. 32). To make Ezekiel more entirely conscious of the evils that were eating out the national life, he is transferred in spirit to the precincts of the Hebrew sanctuary (ch. viii.), the spot on which, if ever, might be found the lingering vestiges of unadulterated truth. But no: in rivalry or feigned alliance with the altar of Jehovah, he beholds 'the image of jealousy.' A nature-god of Canaan, viewed as Baal, the producer, or as Moloch, the destroyer, stands enthroned upon a level with the God of Abraham. 'Son of man,' is the inquiry, 'seest thou what they do, even the great abominations that the house of Israel committed here, that I should go far off from my sanctuary?' And then, as if to indicate the depth of the corruption II. CHAP. now contracted by the Hebrew Church, Ezekiel has to witness, one by one, the other great idolatries, which, in despair of God and of her own religion (v. 2) she had borrowed from the heathen nations round about her. First of all he sees the grovelling rites of Egypt, imaged under 'every form of creeping things and abominable beasts.' The seventy elders of the house of Israel, faithless representatives of those who once had followed Moses to the holy mount (Ex. xxiv. 1) as witnesses of the more secret glory of Jehovah, are now impiously attempting to change that 'glory of the incorruptible God;' they stand before the image of Egyptian reptiles 'every man with his censer in his hand.' Another vision is unfolded to the prophet; he beholds in a fresh quarter of the sacred precincts that the old Phoenician worship of Adonis, the original type of the Osirian mysteries, has threatened to efface the purity of earlier generations. Women are assembled at the temple of Jehovah, to bemoan the loss of Tammuz, as the prelude to licentious revelry and diabolic orgies. Last of all the prophet's eye is fixed upon the inner court of the Lord's house to which the priests alone have access and which priests no longer blush to desecrate and to deride. It does not seem enough that the community at large are superadding the zoolatry of Egypt to the foul abominations of Phoenicia: men of priestly rank, the 'princes of the sanctuary' though kneeling on the sacred threshold, have each turned his back upon the holiest of all, and, like the Old Parsee, whose superstitions they are now adopting 'worship the sun toward the east' (v. 16). Then He said unto II. me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a CHAP. light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here? for they have filled the land with violence, and have returned to provoke Me to anger; and lo, they put the branch to their nose. Therefore will I also deal in fury; Mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in Mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them' (vv. 17, 18). C. A. E. IV. 10 III. Ancient CHAPTER III. Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. Μάγοι δὲ καὶ πᾶν τὸ Αριον γένος, ὡς καὶ τοῦτο γράφει ὁ Εὔδημος, οἱ μὲν τόπον, οἱ δὲ χρόνον καλοῦσι τὸ νοητὸν ἅπαν καὶ τὸ ἡνωμένον· ἐξ οὗ διακριθῆναι ἢ θεὸν ἀγαθὸν καὶ δαίμονα κακὸν, ἢ φῶς καὶ σκότος πρὸ τούτων, ὡς ἐνίους λέγειν. Οὗτοι δὲ οὖν καὶ αὐτοὶ μετὰ τὴν ἀδιάκριτον φύσιν διακρινομένην ποιοῦσι τὴν διττὴν συστοιχίαν τῶν κρειττόνων· τῆς μὲν ἡγεῖσθαι τὸν Ωρομάσδην, τῆς δὲ τὸν ̓Αρειμάνιον.—Damascius, De Primis Principiis, c. cxxv. (p. 384, Kopp). CHAP. IF the object of the present work had been to trace the early growth of heathenism, without regard to the contemporaneous fortunes of the sacred family or the possible interchanges of religious thought between the Hebrew and other systems, the true place of the discussions opened in this chapter would have doubtless been immediately after the religions of Hindustan1. For though it be impossible by means of extant monuments to carry back the civilisation of Persia to the same remote antiquity2, much less to rank her with the 1 This remark appears to have been called for by complaints of an intelligent and not unfriendly critic in the Colonial Church Chronicle, who, in common with some other reviewers of Part III., lost sight of the original intention of the present writer as expressed in the title-page of his work. Let it be again repeated that these chapters do not pretend to furnish a complete and systematic history of ancient heathenism; but rather to exhibit the chief points of correspondency or contrast between heathenism and revealed religion. 2 The true historic period does not commence till five generations before Darius Hystaspis (or about B.C. 680), when Achæmenes founded a kingdom in Persia Proper.' Rawlinson, Journal of As. Soc. xv. 252. Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 147 III. great primeval empires of Babylon, of Egypt, or CHAP. of China, facts are now at our command which will determine the exact position of the Persians proper in the ancient family of man. The region known as Persia (Parasa in cuneiform inscriptions) was a leading province of the 'pure Iran,' whose frontiers, reckoning eastward from the Caspian gates, extended to the very foot of the Hindú Alps; and therefore, as the name' itself will testify, the population which at length predominated was an off-shoot from the Aryan stock, who after settling in the region of the Five Rivers, were the undisputed lords of Arya-vartta and diffused their influence to the southernmost extremity of the Hindú Peninsula. India. The proofs of this connexion have been strength- Related to ened at all points by late researches and inductions of comparative philology. The language of the ancient Persian, or at least that one of many current languages, the Zend, in which the earliest of his 'sacred' books were written, is found to be most intimately related to the Sanskrit of the Védas: it deserves to be entitled second, if not eldest of the sister-tongues which form the Indo-European family. So close, indeed, is the affinity both in structure and in actual words that we are justified on purely philological grounds in urging the protracted intercourse of Persians and Hindús; who clung together as a great community ages 2 See Part II. p. 7, n. 2, and the references there. The form Iran, which has been already detected on coins of the Sassanian period, is undoubtedly equivalent to Ariana, Airya, and Airyana. 2 M. Müller's 'Last Results of the Persian Researches,' as reported in Bunsen's Phil. of Univ. Hist. I.112; Spiegel, Avesta, I. 5, Leipzig, 1852. |