[75] Coneybeare, Dr. F. C., The Historical Christ, p. 19. [Italics mine.] The views of Dr. Coneybeare may be connoted with those of his fellow-cleric, the Rev. H. C. Christmas: “The astrotheology into which Egyptian fables are ultimately resolved having taken animals as symbols, soon elevated those symbols in the minds of the people at large into real divinities. The signs of the zodiac were worshipped, and the constellations not in that important circle did not go without adoration. Various stars became noted as rising or setting at particular seasons, and serving as marks of time; while the physical circumstances of the animal creation gave an easy means of naming the stars and constellations, and thus connected natural history with the symbolical theology of the times.... In their [the Egyptians’] view the earth was but a mirror of the heavens, and celestial intelligences were represented by beasts, birds, fishes, gems, and even by rocks, metals, and plants. The harmony of the spheres was answered by the music of the temples, and the world beheld nothing that was not a type of something divine.”—Universal Mythology, 1838, p. 19.
[76] Quoted from Wentz, W. D. Y., The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
[77] “The current ignorance of those pre-Christian evidences that have been preserved by the petrifying past must be wellnigh invincible when a man like Prof. Jowett could say, as if with the voice of superstition in its dotage: ‘To us the preaching of the Gospel is a New Beginning, from which we date all things; beyond which we neither desire, nor are able, to inquire.’”—Massey, G., The Logic of the Lord, 1897.
[78] Harrison, Miss Jane, Ancient Art and Ritual, pp. 192-3.
[79] A bogey of the present Bishop of London is not “no crops” but “no foreign monarchs”. The Daily Chronicle of 13th May, 1914, reports his Lordship as saying: “If the British Empire was not to be disgraced by the heart of London becoming pagan, his fund must be kept going.” [Italics mine.] “Once religion went, everything else went; it would be good-bye to the visits of foreign monarchs to London, because Londoners would have disgraced the Empire and themselves before the whole world.”
[80] The “celebrated but infamous” Petronius, surnamed Arbiter, philosophised in the first century to the following up-to-date effect:—
Fear made the first divinities on earth
The sweeping flames of heaven; the ruined tower,
Scathed by its stroke. The softly setting sun,
The slow declining of the silver moon,