But why should evil come from the North? “I conceive,” says Gaffarel, “it would stand with sound philosophy to answer, by reason of the darkness and gloominess of the air of those parts, caused by the great distance of the Sun; and also by reason of the Evil Spirits which inhabit dark places.” This reason becomes stronger when it is considered that the word which in the Vulgate is rendered pandetur, may also be rendered depingetur, so that the verse might be translated, “all evils shall be described (or written), from the North;” and if written, then certainly to be read from that direction.
This theory of what Southey has called “the language of the lights of Heaven,” is Jewish. Abu Almasar (nominally well known as Albumazar, by which name the knaves called him who knew nothing of him or his history), derived all religions from the Planets. The Chaldean, he said, was produced by the conjunction of Jupiter with Mars; the Egyptian, by Jupiter with the Sun; Judaism, by Jupiter with Saturn; Christianity, by Jupiter with Mercury; Mahommedanism, by Jupiter with Venus. And in the year 1460, when, according to his calculation, the conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury would again occur, he predicted that the Christian religion would receive its death blow, and the religion of Antichrist begin. Pursuing these fancies, others have asserted that the reason why the Jewish nation always has been miserable, and always must be so, is because their religion was formed under the influences of Saturn:—
Spiteful and cold, an old man melancholy,
With bent and yellow forehead, he is Saturn.1
A malevolent planet he is, and also an unfortunate one, and it was he that
With lead-coloured shine lighting it into life,1
threw a tincture of severity and moroseness over the religion of the Jews; he it was that made them obstinate and covetous, and their Sabbath accordingly is his day. In like manner the character of the Turks and their day of rest have been determined by the planet Venus, which is the star of their religion. And as Christianity began under the influence of the Sun, Sunday is the Christian Sabbath; and the visible head of the Christian Church has his seat in Rome, which is a solar city, its foundations having been laid when the Sun was in Leo, his proper House. Farther proof of this influence is, that the Cardinals wear red, which is a solar colour.
1 WALLENSTEIN.
Dr. Jenkin, in his Discourses upon the Reasonableness and certainty of the Christian Religion, takes into his consideration the opinion of those persons who thought that the stars would shine to little purpose unless there were other habitable worlds besides this earth whereon we dwell. One of the uses for which they serve he supposes to be this, that in all ages the wits of many men whose curiosity might otherwise be very ill employed, have been busied in considering their end and nature, and calculating their distances and motions:—a whimsical argument, in advancing which he seems to have forgotten the mischievous purposes to which so much of the wit which had taken this direction had been applied.
Yet these fancies of the wildest astrologers are not more absurd than the grave proposition of John Craig, whose “Theologiæ Christianæ Principia Mathematica” were published in London at the close of the 17th century. He asserted, and pretended to show by mathematical calculations, that the probability of the truth of the Gospel history was as strong at that time, as it would have been in the days of our Saviour himself, to a person who should have heard it related by twenty-eight disciples; but that, upon the same mathematical grounds, the probability will entirely cease by the year 3150; there would then be no more faith on earth, and, consequently, according to St. Luke, the world would then be at an end, and the Son of Man would come to judge the quick and the dead.
Bayle always ridiculed that sort of evidence which is called mathematical demonstration.