“After the distribution of pure Fire, in the Samothracian Mysteries, a new life began.”[245] This was the “new birth,” that is alluded to by Jesus, in his nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus. “Initiated into the most blessed of all Mysteries, being ourselves pure ... we become just and holy with wisdom.”[246] “He _breathed_ on them and saith unto them, ‘Take the Holy Pneuma.’”[247] And this simple act of will-power was sufficient to impart vaticination in its nobler and most perfect form if both the initiator and the initiated were worthy of it. To deride this gift, even in its present aspect, “as the corrupt offspring and lingering remains of an ignorant age of superstition, and hastily to condemn it as unworthy of sober investigation, would be as unphilosophical as it is wrong,” remarks the Rev. J. B. Gross. “To remove the veil which hides our vision from the future, has been attempted—in all ages of the world; and therefore the propensity to pry into the lap of time, contemplated as one of the faculties of human mind, comes recommended to us under the sanction of God.... Zuinglius, the Swiss reformer, attested the comprehensiveness of his faith in the providence of the Supreme Being, in the cosmopolitan doctrine that the Holy Ghost was not entirely excluded from the more worthy portion of {133} the heathen world. Admitting its truth, we cannot easily conceive a valid reason why a heathen, thus favored, should not be capable of true prophecy.”[248] Now, what is this mystic, primordial substance? In the book of _Genesis_, at the beginning of the first chapter, it is termed the “face of the waters,” said to have been incubated by the “Spirit of God.” Job mentions, in chap. xxvi., 5, that “dead things are formed from under the waters, and inhabitants thereof.” In the original text, instead of “dead things,” it is written dead _Rephaim_ (giants, or mighty primitive men), from whom “Evolution” may one day trace our present race. In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph the Eternal _unrevealed_ God is represented by a snake-emblem of eternity encircling a water-urn, with his head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with his breath. In this case the serpent is the Agathodaimon, the good spirit; in its opposite aspect it is the Kakothodaimon—the bad one. In the Scandinavian _Eddas_, the honey-dew—the food of the gods and of the creative, busy Yggdrasill—bees—falls during the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the universe _out of water_; this dew is the astral light in one of its combinations and possesses creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oännes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant world created out of _water_ and all beings originating from this _prima materia_. Moses teaches that only earth and _water_ can bring a living