In the sun hath he placed a tabernacle for himself[603] ... his going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
Jehovah then is the sun, and thence also the Christ of the Roman Church. And now the criticism of Dupuis on that verse becomes comprehensible, as also the despair of the Abbé Foucher. “Nothing is more favourable to Sabæism than this text of the Vulgate!” he exclaims. And, however disfigured may be the words and sense in the English authorised bible, the Vulgate and the Septuagint both give the correct text of the original, and translate the latter: “In the sun he established his abode”; while the Vulgate regards the “heat” as coming direct from God and not from the sun alone, since it is God who issues forth from, and dwells in the sun and performs the circuit: in sole posuit ... et ipse exultavit. From these facts it will be seen that the Protestants were right in charging St. Justin with saying that
God has permitted us to worship the sun.
And this, notwithstanding the lame excuses that what was really meant was that
God permitted himself to be worshipped in, or within, the sun,
which is all the same.
It will be seen from the above, that while the Pagans located in the sun and planets only the inferior powers of Nature, the representative Spirits, so to say, of Apollo, Bacchus, Osiris, and other solar gods, the Christians, in their hatred of Philosophy, appropriated the sidereal localities, and now limit them to the use of their anthropomorphic deity and his angels—new transformations of the old, old gods. Something had to be done in order to dispose of the ancient tenants, so they were disgraced into “demons,” wicked devils.