The three wise men—who came from the East to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him”[560]—to a mortal certainty imparted to him the intelligence!
Here you see them with crosses upon their crowns,[561] the religious counterparts of our Irish shamrocs![562] And surely, as Jesus was then but an infant, those mysterious devices were commemorative of His crucifixion, when “He came to His own,”—and not to that which occurred while He “dwelt among us,” a catastrophe which had not yet taken place!
Nor is it alone this single phrase (τα ιδια) that I claim as Oriental—the five first verses of this Gospel, as at present arranged, appertain also thereto. They speak the doctrine alike of the Budhists and of the Free-masons; but in diction, and in peculiarity, in tone, in point, and essence, they are irrefragably Irish.[563]
That St. John never wrote them is beyond all question! but having found them to his hand, existing after the circuit of centuries and ages, the composition seemed so pure, and so consonant with Christianity, nay, its very vitality and soul, he adopted it as the preface to his own production, which begins only at the sixth verse, opening with, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John”!
Having asserted that the preliminary part was inalienably Irish, I now undertake to prove a radical misconception, nay, a derogation from the majesty of the Messiah, to have crept into the text, in consequence of its having been translated by persons unacquainted with that language!
The term logos, which you render word, means to an iota the spiritual flame—log, or logh, being the original denomination. The Greeks, who had borrowed all their religion from the Irish, adopted this also from their vocabulary; but its form not being suited to the genius of their language, they fashioned it thereto by adding the termination os, as loghos; and thus did it become identified in sound with the common logos, which they had before, and which merely expresses a word or term!
But though thus confounded, their philosophers, for a long time, kept both expressions distinct. The former they ever considered a foreign importation, rendering it, as we did, by the spiritual flame; as is evident from Zeno making use of the expression, δια του παντος λογος, that is, the spiritual flame, which is diffused through, and vivifies everything.
Pythagoras is so explicit upon this spiritual flame, that you would swear he was paraphrasing the first five verses of St. John.
“God,” says he, “is neither the object of sense, nor subject to passion, but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent. In His body, He is like the light, and in His soul He resembles truth. He is the universal spirit that pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings receive their life from Him. There is but one only God, who is not, as some are apt to imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the universe; but being Himself all in all, He sees all the beings that fill His immensity, the only principle, the light of Heaven, the Father of all. He produces everything, He orders and disposes everything; He is the reason, the life, and the motion of all being.”