The most ancient idolatry, and which probably was the first deviation from the worship of the one true God, seems to have been the worship of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars. Diodorus Siculus informs us, that "the most ancient people of Egypt, looking up to the world above them, and the nature of the universe, and being struck with astonishment and admiration, supposed the sun and moon to be the eternal, and first or principal gods." He afterwards adds, that they supposed these gods governed the world. Eusebius says, concerning the Phoenicians, that the first natural philosphers among them "looked upon the sun and moon, and other wandering stars, and the elements and the things that were connected with these, to be the only gods. Sir William Jones, treating of the Arabs, says: "The people of Yemen very soon fell into the common but fatal error of adoring the sun and the firmament; for even the third in descent from Yoktan, who was consequently as old as Nahor, took the surname of Abdushams, or servant of the sun; and his family, we are assured, paid particular honors to that luminary."

Treating of the Tartars, Sir W. Jones says: "From old Grecian authorities we learn that the Massagete worshiped the sun; and the narrative of an embassy from Justin to the emperor, who then resided in a fine vale near the sources of the Irtish, mentions the Tartarean ceremony of purifying the Roman ambassadors, by conducting them between two fires." The Assyrians and Chaldeans are supposed to have been the first that rendered divine worship to the heavenly bodies. Sir W. Jones on this subject says: "We learn from the Dabistan, that the popular worship of the Iranians, under Hushang, was pure Sabian, a word of which I cannot offer any certain etymology, but which has been deduced by grammarians from Saba, a host, and particularly the host of heaven, or the celestial bodies, in the adoration of which, the Sabian ritual is supposed to have consisted." Maimonides says, that "the ancient Zabians filled a great part of the earth, that they held that there is no God, besides the stars; that they are all deities; but that the sun is the great or chief god; and that the highest notion they formed of God was, that he is the spirit or soul of the celestial orbs. In like manner Philo Biblius, the translator of Sanconiathon's Phoenician history, says, concerning the ancient inhabitants of Phoenicia, that "they accounted this god, speaking of the sun, to be the only lord of heaven;" and therefore he adds, they call him Baal Jamon, which, in the Phonician language, has that signification. It appears, from a passage in Job, that in his time, the worship of the heavenly bodies was practised,

it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth kissed my hand; this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God which is above."*

Plato bears testimony that the ancient Greeks worshiped the heavenly bodies. The first inhabitants of Greece, says he, "appear to me to have esteemed those only to be gods, as many of the barbarians now do, the sun, and moon, and the earth, and stars, and heaven." Aristotle bears the same testimony, for he says, "It hath been delivered down to us, by the ancients and those of old times, both that these (the stars) were gods, and that the divinity comprehendeth whole, or universal nature." Plutarch gives an authentic testimony to the general opinion and practice in his time, and plainly expresses his approbation of it. In his answer to Baletes, the Epicurean, he reckons it among the things which are most firmly believed, and which cannot without great absurdity be denied, "That there is a providence, and that the sun and moon are animated, whom, says he, all men worship, and to whom they offer up sacrifice and prayers." Homer says of the sun, that "he seeth and knoweth all things." Menander declares," that men ought to worship him as the first, or chief of the gods." Macrobius, who flourished under the emperors Honorius and Theodosus, and who was himself a pagan, attempts to prove, that the sun was the one universal deity, who was adored under several names and characters; and he concludes with observing, that the priests and diviners were wont to use this prayer in their devotions, or holy ceremonies: "O almighty, or all-governing sun, the spirit of the world, the power of the world, the light of the world." He also states that the Assyrians gave the name Adad to him whom they worshiped, as the highest and greatest god; that this name being interpreted signifies one; and that by him they understood the sun. As regards the Chinese, it is said to have been their custom, from the time of their first emperor Fohi, for their emperors to sacrifice to heaven and earth, and from a remote antiquity they have worshiped the sun, moon, and stars. The sun was also the principal deity of the Mexicans and Peruvians, to whom they erected temples, and offered sacrifices, and paid their most solemn acts of worship. This kind of idolatry therefore, which the scripture calls the worship of the host of heaven, has obtained in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America.

But there was another species of idolatry which also began at an

* Job, xxxi. 26, 27, 28.

early period of the world, and which very generally obtained among the nations of the earth; that was the worship of deified men or heroes. This idolatry produced an amazing multiplicity of gods, and continually increased. From political views, kings, and the founders of cities and commonwealths, encouraged the worship of those who had once been men, and took them into the number of their gods. As those who set up the heaven, the sun and stars, for gods, applied to them the name and attributes of the supreme deity; so when the custom of worshiping deified men took place, their names and titles, and the rights of their worship came at length to be confounded with the celestial deities, and both the one and the other had those attributes ascribed to them, and that worship paid to them, which properly belong to the one God, the creator of the universe. Philo Biblius, according to Eusebius, observes, "it is a thing particularly remarkable, that they applied the names of their kings to the elements of the universe, and to several of those things which they esteemed to be gods, and which he calls natural gods, viz. the sun, moon, and stars.” This caused an inextricable confusion in heathen worship. Thus Osiris among the Egyptians, Bel among the Chaldeans, and the Baal of the Phoenicians, signified both a deified man, and the sun. Many other names of their gods might be mentioned, which were the names both of stars and heroes; and they were both honored with the most divine titles and epithets. Several writers have shown that the names of some of these gods were corruptions of the Hebrew names of God, as Jove, &c., which were originally understood of the one supreme deity, but afterwards came to be applied to deified heroes. Who all these heroes were, that were worshiped as gods, it is impossible to tell; yet that, in several instances, there was in the heathen mythology, a mixture of obscure traditions relating to some of the progenitors of the human race, whose names are mentioned in the scriptures, would not be difficult to prove.

Sir William Jones, in his Asiatic researches, traces the origin of this idolatry of deified men, and also that of the worship of the heavenly bodies to the same source, viz. to a nation of Hindoos who originally possessed and governed the country of Iran, or ancient Persia, and which, after a careful and learned investigation of the subject, and upon unexceptionable evidence, he calls the oldest monarchy in the world. After having given the evidence upon which his opinion is founded, he says, concerning Iran, "Thus it has been proved by clear evidence and plain reasoning, that a powerful monar

government; that it was a Hindoo monarchy, though if any choose to call it Cusian, Casdean, or Scythian, we shall not enter into a debate on mere names; that it subsisted many centuries, and that its history has been engrafted on that of the Hindoos who founded the monarchies of Ayodhya and Indraprestha; that the language of the first Persian empire was the mother of the Sanscrit, and consequently of the Zend, and Parsi, as well as of Greek, Latin, and Gothic; that the language of the Assyrians was the parent of Chaldaic and Pahlavi, and that the primary Tartarean language also had been current in the same empire; although, as the Tartars had no books, or even letters, we cannot with certainty trace their unpolished and variable idioms. We discover, therefore, in Persia, at the earliest dawn of history, the three distinct races of men, whom we described on former occasions as possessors of India, Arabia, Tartary;" (viz. the Hamian, the Arabian, and the Tartarean race,) "and whether they were collected in Iran from distant regions, or diverged from it, as from a common centre, we shall easily determine, by the following considerations. Let us observe, in the first place, the central position of Iran, which is bounded by Arabia, by Tartary, and by India, whilst Arabia lies too contiguous to Iran only, but is remote from Tartary, and divided even from the skirts of India by a considerable gulf. No country, therefore, but Persia seems likely to have sent forth its colonies to all the kingdoms of Asia. The Brahmins could never have migrated from India to Iran, because they are expressly forbidden by their oldest existing laws, never to leave the region, which they inhabit to this day; the Arabs have not even a tradition of an emigration into Persia, before Mohammed, nor had they indeed any inducement to quit their beautiful and extensive domains; and, as to the Tartars, we have no trace in history of their departure from their plains and forests till the invasion of the Medes, who, according to etymologists, were the sons of Madai, and even they were conducted by the princes of an Assyrian family.

The three races, therefore, whom we have already mentioned, (and more than three we have not yet found,) migrated from Iran, as from their common country; and thus the Saxon chronicle, I presume good authority, brings the first inhabitants of Britain from Armenia, while a late very learned writer concludes, after all his laborious researches, that the Goths, or Scythians, came from Persia; and another contends with great force, that both the Irish and old Britons proceeded severally from the borders of the Caspian; a coincidence of conclusions from different media, by persons wholly unconnected, which could

scarce have happened, if they were not grounded on solid principles. We may therefore hold this proposition firmly established, that Iran, or Persia, in its largest sense, was the true centre of population, of knowledge, of languages, and of arts, which instead of traveling westward only, as it has been fancifully supposed, or eastward, as might with equal reason have been asserted, were expanded in all directions, to all the regions of the world, in which the Hindoo race had settled under various denominations."*

Of the idolatry of ancient Iran, Sir William Jones, after having given the statement already quoted,concerning the worship of the heavenly bodies, proceeds, "The planetary worship in Persia, seems only a part of a far more complicated religion, which we now find in these Indian provinces; for Moshan assures us that in the opinion of the best informed Persians, who professed the faith of Hushang, distinguished from that of Zeratusht, the first monarch of Iran, and of the whole earth, was Nahabab, a word apparently Sanscrit, who divided the people into four orders, the religious, the military, the commercial, and the servile, to which he assigns names unquestionably the same in their origin to those now applied to the four primary classes of the Hindoos. They added, that he received and promulgated among men a sacred book in a heavenly language, to which the Mussleman author gives the Arabic title of Desater, or regulations, but the original name of which he has not mentioned; and that fourteen Nahababs had appeared or would appear in human shape, for the government of this world. Now when we know that the Hindoos believe in fourteen Menus or celestial personages, with similar functions, the first of whom left a book of regulations, or divine ordinances, which they hold equal to the Veda, and the language of which they believe to be that of the gods, we can hardly doubt, that the first corruption of the purest and oldest religion, was the system of Indian theology, invented by the Brahmins, and prevalent in these territories," (India, where Sir W. Jones then resided,) " where the book of Nahabab or Menu is at this hour the standard of all religious and moral duties."

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That the Hindoo worship of deified men spread from Iran (ancient Persia,) to the four quarters of the globe, is supported by indisputable facts. The ancient temples found in Mexico contained idols of the same character with those in the temples of Hindostan, and the system of idolatry practised by the aboriginal inhabitants of America, has been identified as the same with that of the Hindoos. Treating