To object to the title of LUCIFER, only because its “associations are so dreadful,” is pardonable—if it can be pardonable in any case—only in an ignorant American missionary of some dissenting sect, in one whose natural laziness and lack of education led him to prefer ploughing the minds of heathens, as ignorant as he is himself, to the more profitable, but rather more arduous, process of ploughing the fields of his own father’s farm. In the English clergy, however, who receive all a more or less classical education, and are, therefore, supposed to be acquainted with the _ins_ and _outs_ of theological sophistry and casuistry, this kind of opposition is absolutely unpardonable. It not only smacks of hypocrisy and deceit, but places them directly on a lower moral level than him they call the apostate angel. By endeavouring to show the theological Lucifer, fallen through the idea that “To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell; Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” they are virtually putting into practice the supposed crime they would fain accuse him of. They prefer reigning over the spirit of the masses by means of a pernicious dark LIE, productive of many an evil, than serve heaven by serving TRUTH. Such practices are worthy only of the Jesuits. But their sacred writ is the first to contradict their interpretations and the association of Lucifer, the Morning Star, with Satan. Chapter XXII. of _Revelation_, verse 16th, says: “I, Jesus ... am the root ... and the bright and _Morning Star_” (ὀρθρινὸς “early rising”): hence Eosphoros, or the Latin Lucifer. The opprobrium attached to this name is of such a very late date, that the Roman Church found itself forced to screen the theological slander behind a two-sided interpretation—as usual. Christ, we are told, is the “Morning Star,” the _divine_ Lucifer; and Satan the _usurpator_ of the _Verbum_, the “infernal Lucifer.”[2] “The great Archangel Michael, the conqueror of Satan, is identical in paganism[3] with Mercury-Mithra, to whom, after defending the Sun (symbolical of God) from the attacks of Venus-Lucifer, was given the possession of this planet, _et datus est ei locus Luciferi_. And since the Archangel Michael is the ‘Angel of the Face,’ and ‘the Vicar of the _Verbum_’ he is now considered in the Roman Church as the regent of that planet Venus which ‘the vanquished fiend had usurped.’” _Angelus faciei Dei sedem superbi humilis obtinuit_, says Cornelius à Lapide (in Vol. VI. p. 229). ----- Footnote 2: Mirville’s Memoirs to the Academy of France, Vol. IV., quoting Cardinal Ventura. Footnote 3: Which paganism has passed long milleniums, it would seem, in _copying beforehand_ Christian dogmas to come. -----