The songs of Iopas, in the banquet offered by Dido to the Trojans, contain the lessons of the learned Atlas about the course of the sun and of the moon; about the origin of men, of animals, etc. In the Pastorals of Virgil, the old Silene sings the chaos and the organization of the world. Orpheus does the same in the Argonautics of Apollonius. The cosmogony of Sanchoniaton, or of the Phoenicians, conceals under the veil of allegories the great secrets of nature which were taught to those initiated. The philosophers who succeeded to the poets called all the parts of the universe divine. In the opinion of Pythagoras the celestial bodies were immortal and divine. The sun, the moon, and all the stars superabundantly contained heat, or principle of life. He placed the substance of the deity in the ethereal fire, of which the sun, he said, was the main focus. Parmenides imagined a halo around the world, and called it the substance of the deity; the stars partook of the nature thereof. Alimeon of Crotona taught that the sun, the moon, and the stars were the gods. Antisthenes acknowledged but one deity, nature. Plato attributed divinity to the world, to the sky, to the stars, and to the earth. Xenocrates and Heraclides admitted eight great gods, the seven planets and the heaven of the fixed stars. Theophrastes called the stars and the celestial signs first causes. Zenon said that the ether, the stars, time and its parts were gods. Cleanthes admitted the dogma of the divinity of the universe, and more especially of the ethereal fire that envelops the spheres, and penetrates them. Diogene, the Babylonian, related the whole mythology to nature. Chrysippus held that the world was God. He placed the divine substance in the ethereal fire, in the sun, in the moon, in the stars, in one word, in nature and its principal parts. Anaximandre, Anaximenes and Zenon had the same belief. From this exposition of the religious and political monuments of ancient peoples, of their celebrations, and of the opinions of their philosophers; and also of the historical facts brought forth before, we draw these two logical and vital conclusions:-- 1st. Therefore the adoration of the vast body of nature, together with the great soul which was supposed to animate it; and of its principal parts and members, together with the multifarious emanations of the great soul which was supposed to animate them, was the former and universal religion of mankind (excepting the Hebrews) before the coming of Jesus Christ. 2d. Therefore the heathens did not worship the idols themselves, to which they had given such and such forms to represent the objects of their adorations, but they worshiped what in their mind they represented, the universe taken collectively, as in the idol of Pan; and the universe taken separately, namely, the important parts of the universe, as in their innumerable idols of the planets, stars, rivers, etc. CHAPTER II. PAGAN ORIGIN OF MYSTERIES.