[372:9] Ibid.
[373:1] Indian Antiquities, vol. i. p. 127.
[373:2] Higgins: Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 14.
The following answer is stated by Manetho, an Egyptian priest, to have been given by an Oracle to Sesostris: "On his return through Africa he entered the sanctuary of the Oracle, saying: 'Tell me, O thou strong in fire, who before me could subjugate all things? and who shall after me?' But the Oracle rebuked him, saying, 'First, God; then the Word; and with them, the Spirit.'" (Nimrod, vol. i. p. 119, in Ibid. vol. i. p. 805.)
Here we have distinctly enumerated God, the Logos, and the Spirit or Holy Ghost, in a very early period, long previous to the Christian era.
[373:3] I. John, v. 7. John, i. 1.
[373:4] The Alexandrian theology, of which the celebrated Plato was the chief representative, taught that the Logos was "the second God;" a being of divine essence, but distinguished from the Supreme God. It is also called "the first-born Son of God."
"The Platonists furnished brilliant recruits to the Christian churches of Asia Minor and Greece, and brought with them their love for system and their idealism." "It is in the Platonizing or Alexandrian, branch of Judaism that we must seek for the antecedents of the Christian doctrine of the Logos." (A. Revillé: Dogma Deity Jesus, p. 29.)
[373:5] Higgins: Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 102. Mithras, the Mediator, and Saviour of the Persians, was called the Logos. (See Dunlap's Son of the Man, p. 20. Bunsen's Angel-Messiah, p. 75.) Hermes was called the Logos. (See Dunlap's Son of the Man, p. 39, marginal note.)
[373:6] Bonwick's Egyptian Belief, p. 402.