The Egyptian deity, Bacchus, or the wine-producing god, being also a personification of the sun, is the same as Christ, and of course, like him, visited the "lowest regions" after being unjustly put to death. These being only the Egyptian and Indian names for the same divinity, it was quite in analogy to preserve a symbolical allusion to the vine and blood of the grape, in the crucifixion of Christ. But it requires little penetration to perceive that all we find there said about the "agony,"* in the garden, and sweating "great drops of blood," has a very plain allusion to the wine-press and the compression of the grapes;** and here the secret meaning is as near the surface as it possibly can be in allegory. The rich, sweet juice is at first expressed in "great drops," or copiously, and is called "the blood of the grape;" by a second pressure, the thin lees, or "vinegar," is compressed, which they are allegorically said to have given him to drink; and after this last process the business is truly said to be "finished." After this manner, and in every age and country of the world, down to the present day, have the allegories invented by priests, and cunningly drawn from the astronomical phænomena of nature, passed for religion amongst the unthinking million.*** If the cruel usage given to John Barleycorn, in the process of turning him into beer, had been allegorised to us in our present ignorance, and priest-nursed stupidity, it would have answered equally as well as the fable of Christ and the "blood of the wine-press." * "An Agony literally is a wine-press."--Taylor. ** "And the wine-press was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the wine-press" (Rey. xiv., 20). *** The Crucifixion of Christ is so manifestly a new version of that of Prometheus (another name of the sun), that in our translations of that tragedy of Æschylus, the crucifixion of the original is never, acknowledged; but he is always fraudulently said to be bound. "The object of this impudent fraud," says Mr. Higgins, "need not be pointed out."