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Further, we are told that in the land of the Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant harvest vouchsafed by the diety; but if the crops were to fail that year, the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary as at other times.
"He offered to the great family of man a Church with a Diety at its head and a religion peculiarly of principles. He left the moral code of Christianity untouched in its loveliness. After the death of St. Paul," continues Burton, "Christianity sank into a species of idolatry.
But these were found to lead to such heated and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the community and divide families before the most united, but in the course of discussing the attributes of the Diety, the existence of the Diety Himself became argued away, or, what was worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the human disputants.
To stand at the head of created matter, to be the noblest of all the works of God, the only created thing wearing the image, and stamped with the patent of Diety, are proud things to boast of. But great and glorious and proud as they are, they have their balances of evil. They bring with them no contentment, no repose, while they heap upon us boundless necessities and limitless wants.
The conception of Diety to the simple man who visualizes, immediately takes on the form of a court. We speak of the Courts of Heaven. The pictures of Godhead represent him as sitting in the center on his raised throne with the surrounding tiers of attendant angels. The modern court-room is only an adapted continuation of a medieval idea.
Both man and beast rejoyce at his approach, And birds do sing, to see his glittering Coach And though nought, but Salamanders live in fire And fly Pyrausta call'd, all else expire, Yet men and beasts Astronomers will tell Fixed in heavenly Constellations dwell, My Planets of both Sexes whose degree Poor Heathen judg'd worthy a Diety; There's Orion arm'd attended by his dog; The Theban stout Alcides with his Club; The valiant Persens, who Medusa slew, The horse that kil'd Beleuphon, then flew.
"We'd better keep him warm, hadn't we?" suggested Alfred, remembering Aggie's previous instructions on a similar occasion. "I'll put him in his crib," he decided, and thereupon he made a quick move toward the bassinette. Staggering back from the cradle with the unsteadiness of a drunken man Alfred called upon the Diety.
Lastly, among the more important characteristics of the Vril-ya, as distinguished from our mankind lastly, and most important on the bearings of their life and the peace of their commonwealths, is their universal agreement in the existence of a merciful beneficent Diety, and of a future world to the duration of which a century or two are moments too brief to waste upon thoughts of fame and power and avarice; while with that agreement is combined another viz., since they can know nothing as to the nature of that Diety beyond the fact of His supreme goodness, nor of that future world beyond the fact of its felicitous existence, so their reason forbids all angry disputes on insoluble questions.
The fact is, that in India and in Egypt, the Divine creative power which produced all things and energizes in everything, was symbolized by the Phallus; and to this day, in Hindostan, the operation of Diety upon matter is symbolized by images of the same; and in the darkest recesses of their Temples, which none but the initiated were permitted to enter: the Phallus of stone is the solitary idol, before which the illuminated bowed.
Grimes. O, my deare Master! Lady. Repent! should I but spend The weakest accent of my breath in sighes Or vaine compunction, I should feare I sinnd Against my will, then which I doe confes Noe other diety. Passions doe surround My intellectual powers; only my heart, Like to a Rocky Island, does advance Above the foming violence of the waves Its unmovd head, bids me my fate outdare.
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