As my own part of the following remarks were printed long before I saw Mr. Newton's manuscript, I hope to be pardoned for allowing them to stand. The bulk of the volume will not be increased to the extent of a full page.
If I were to be asked the reason why I differ from Mr. Newton in his exalted idea about the adoption of certain bodily organs as types, tokens, or emblems of an unseen and an inscrutable Creator, my answer would be drawn from the observations made upon every known order of priesthood, from the most remote antiquity to the present time. No matter what the creed, whether Ancient or Modern, the main object of its exponents and supporters is to gain over the minds of the populace. This has never yet been done, and probably never will be attempted, by educating the mind of the multitude to think.
In Great Britain we find three sets of hierarchs opposed to each other, and all equally, by every means in their power, prohibit independent inquiry.
A young Romanist convert, as we have recently seen, is discouraged from persevering in the study of history and logic; a Presbyterian is persecuted, as far as the law of the land permits, if he should engage in an honest study of the Bible, of the God which it presents for our worship, and of the laws that it enforces. A bishop of the Church of England is visited by the puny and spiteful efforts of some of his nominal equals if he ventures to treat Jewish writings as other critics study the tomes of Livy or of Herodotus.
One set of men have banded together to elect a god on earth, and endeavour to coerce their fellow-mortals to believe that a selection by a few old cardinals can make the one whom they choose to honour "infallible."
Another set of men, who profess to eschew the idea of infallibility in a Pope, assume that they possess the quality themselves, and endeavour to blot out from the communion of the faithful those who differ from them "on points which God hath left at large."
Surely, when with all our modern learning, thought, and scientific enquiry, hierarchs still set their faces against an advance in knowledge, and quell, if possible, every endeavour to search after truth, we are not far wrong when we assert, that the first priests of barbarism had no exalted views of such an abstract subject as life, in the higher and highest senses, if indeed in any sense of the word.
Another small point of difference between my friend and me is, whether there has been at any time a figured representation of a kakodoemon—except since the beginning of Christianity—and if, by way of stretching a point, we call Typhon—Satan or the Devil—by this name, as being opposed to the Agathodoemon, whether we are justified in providing this evil genius with wings. As far as I can judge from Chaldean and Assyrian sculptures, wings were given to the lesser deities as our artists assign them to modern angels. The Babylonian Apollyon, by whatever name he went, was winged—but so were all the good gods. The Egyptians seem to have assigned wings only to the favourable divinities. The Jews had in their mythology a set of fiery flying serpents, but we must notice that their cherubim and seraphim were all winged, some with no less than three pairs—much as Hindoo gods have four heads and six, or any other number of arms.
Mr. Newton assumes that the dragon mentioned in Rev. xii. was a winged creature, but it is clear from the context, especially from verses 14 and 15, that he had no pinions, for he was unable to follow the woman to whom two aerial oars had been given.
The dragon, as we know it, is, I believe, a mediæval creation; such a creature is only spoken of in the Bible in the book of Revelation, and the author of that strange production drew his inspiration on this point from the Iliad, where a dragon is described as of huge size, coiled like a snake, of blood-red colour, shot with changeful hues, and having three heads. Homer, Liddell, and Scott add—used [—Greek—] indifferently for a serpent. So does the author of Rev. in ch. xx. 2. I have been unable to discover any gnostic gem with anything like a modern dragon on it.