Pyth. How do you reckon?
Pur. One, two, three, four.
Pyth. Do you see? What you conceive four, these are ten; and a perfect triangle, and our oath.
Now, Pythagoras, though a Samian, was educated in Egypt; and the religious mysteries, with which he had been there imbued, are what is so profanely ridiculed by this infidel scoffer.
It is not my province to justify the ceremonial of the Egyptians, any further than as indicative of gratitude to the Godhead; but the reflection must suggest itself to every observant mind, that they are never called idolaters in any part of the Pentateuch; and Plutarch, in addition, positively asserts that “they had inserted nothing into their worship without a reason,—nothing merely fabulous,—nothing superstitious; but their institutions have reference either to morals or something useful in life, and bear a beautiful resemblance, many of them, to some facts in history, or some appearance in nature.”
If we investigate the secret of this Pythagorean asseveration, we shall find that the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, thrice joined, and touching each other, as it were, in three angles, in this manner—
constitute an equilateral triangle, and amount also, in calculation, to ten. While the inward mystery, couched under its figure, embraced all that was solemn in religion and in thought, being, in fact, the index of male and female united—the unit, in the centre, standing for the Lingam.
Look now at the form of the great Egyptian pyramid; and is it not precisely that of the above triangle? Is there not, also, an aperture into it, about the middle as here?[281] And when to all, we add the notion of wells of water withinside, is not the demonstration complete, that the goddess of the Lotos, the soft promoter of desire, the arbitress of man, and the compeer of the angels, was the honoured object of its symbolical erection?[282]
In 1 Pet. iii. 20, it is asserted that only “eight persons” were preserved in the ark. Let us suppose them to have been Noah and his wife, with his three sons and their wives. At a comparatively short interval after the date assigned to this event,—at most but 352 years,—on Abraham’s arrival in the land of Egypt, we find a flourishing kingdom, an organised police, a systematic legislature, and comprehensive institutions, diffused over its surface. All the other parts of the world, we must be ready to presume, if not equally enlightened, were, at least, as populous; and I put it to your good sense to decide, whether eight individuals could, within that period, not only procreate so plentifully as to replenish the whole earth, but enlighten it, additionally, with such a coruscation of science, as no subsequent era has been since able to eclipse?