The Babylonians said, "We reckon four hundred and seventy-three thousand years of astronomical observations." A Parisian, addressing him, says, "Your account is correct; your years consisted each of a solar day; they amount to twelve hundred and ninety-seven of ours, from the time of Atlas, the great astronomer, king of Africa, till the arrival of Alexander at Babylon."
But, whatever our Parisian may say, no people in the world have ever confounded a day with a year; and the people of Babylon still less than any other. This Parisian stranger should have contented himself with merely observing to the Chaldæans: "You are exaggerators, and our ancestors were ignorant. Nations are exposed to too many revolutions to permit their keeping a series of four thousand seven hundred and thirty-six centuries of astronomical calculations. And, with respect to Atlas, king of the Moors, no one knows at what time he lived. Pythagoras might pretend to have been a cock, just as reasonably as you may boast of such a series of observations."
The great point of ridicule in all fantastic chronologies is the arrangement of all the great events of a man's life in precise order of time, without ascertaining that the man himself ever existed. Lenglet repeats after others, in his chronological compilation of universal history, that precisely in the time of Abraham, and six years after the death of Sarah, who was little known to the Greeks, Jupiter, at the age of sixty-two, began to reign in Thessaly; that his reign lasted sixty years; that he married his sister Juno; that he was obliged to cede the maritime coasts to his brother Neptune; and that the Titans made war against him. But was there ever a Jupiter? It never occurred to him that with this question he should have begun.
CHURCH.
Summary of the History of the Christian Church.
We shall not extend our views into the depths of theology. God preserve us from such presumption. Humble faith alone is enough for us. We never assume any other part than that of mere historians.
In the years that immediately followed Jesus Christ, who was at once God and man, there existed among the Hebrews nine religious schools or societies—Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenians, Judahites, Therapeutæ, Rechabites, Herodians, the disciples of John, and the disciples of Jesus, named the "brethren," the "Galileans," the "believers," who did not assume the name of Christians till about the sixteenth year of our era, at Antioch; being directed to its adoption by God himself, in ways unknown to men. The Pharisees believed in the metempsychosis. The Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul, and the existence of spirits, yet believed in the Pentateuch.
Pliny, the naturalist—relying, evidently, on the authority of Flavius Josephus—calls the Essenians "gens æterna in qua nemo nascitur"—"a perpetual family, in which no one is ever born"—because the Essenians very rarely married. The description has been since applied to our monks.
It is difficult to decide whether the Essenians or the Judahites are spoken of by Josephus in the following passage: "They despise the evils of the world; their constancy enables them to triumph over torments; in an honorable cause, they prefer death to life. They have undergone fire and sword, and submitted to having their very bones crushed, rather than utter a syllable against their legislator, or eat forbidden food."