"In these _mysteries_, after the attendants had for a long time bewailed the death of this _just person_, he was at length understood to be _restored to life_, to have experienced a _resurrection_; signified by the re-admission of light. On this the priest addressed the company, saying, 'Comfort yourselves, all ye who have been partakers of the mysteries of the deity, thus preserved: for we shall now enjoy some respite from our labors:' to which were added these words: 'I have scaped a sad calamity, and my lot is greatly mended.' The people answered by the invocation: 'Hail to the Dove! the Restorer of Light!'"[218:2] Alexander Murray tells us that the ancient Greeks also celebrated this festival in honor of the resurrection of Adonis, in the course of which a figure of him was produced, and the ceremony of burial, with weeping and songs of wailing, gone through. After these a joyful shout was raised: "_Adonis lives and is risen again._"[218:3] Plutarch, in his life of Alcibiades and of Nicias, tells us that it was at the time of the celebration of the death of _Adonis_ that the Athenian fleet set sail for its unlucky expedition to Sicily; that nothing but images of dead Adonises were to be met with in the streets, and that they were carried to the sepulchre in the midst of an immense train of women, crying and beating their breasts, and imitating in every particular the lugubrious pomp of interments. Sinister omens were drawn from it, which were only too much realized by subsequent events.[218:4] It was in an oration or address delivered to the Emperors Constans and Constantius that Julius Firmicius wrote concerning the rites celebrated by the heathens in commemoration of the resurrection of Adonis. In his tide of eloquence he breaks away into indignant objurgation of the priest who officiated in those _heathen mysteries_, which, he admitted, resembled the _Christian sacrament_ in honor of the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, so closely that there was really no difference between them, except that no sufficient proof had been given to the world of the resurrection of Adonis, _and no divine oracle had borne witness to his resurrection_, nor had he shown himself alive after his death to those who were concerned to have assurance of the fact that they might believe. The _divine oracle_, be it observed, which Julius Firmicius says had borne testimony to Christ Jesus' resurrection, _was none other than the answer of the god Apollo, whom the Pagans worshiped at Delphos_, which this writer derived from Porphyry's books "_On the Philosophy of Oracles_."[219:1] Eusebius, the celebrated ecclesiastical historian, has also condescended to quote this claimed testimony from _a Pagan oracle_, as furnishing one of the most convincing proofs that could be adduced in favor of the resurrection of Christ Jesus.