Regarding the transference of the attributes of Isis to Mary, Newton, in his "Assyrian Grove and Other Emblems," says: "When Mary, the mother of Jesus, took the place in Christendom of 'the great goddess,' the dogmas which propounded her immaculate conception and perpetual virginity followed as a matter of course." "The 'Black Virgins,'" says King, "so highly reverenced in certain French cathedrals during the middle ages, proved, when critically examined, basalt figures of Isis." Mrs. Besant believes that Christianity was derived chiefly from Egypt: "It grew out of Egypt; its gospels came from thence [Alexandria]; its ceremonies were learned there; its Virgin is Isis; its Christ Osiris and Horus." Of the antiquity of Egypt's religion, and the mutability of the gods, that brilliant young Englishman, Winwood Reade, thus writes: "Buried cities are beneath our feet; the ground on which we tread is the pavement of a tomb. See the pyramids towering to the sky, with men, like insects, crawling round their base; and the Sphinx, couched in vast repose, with a ruined temple between its paws. Since those great monuments were raised the very heavens have been changed. When the architects of Egypt began their work, there was another polar star in the northern sky, and the southern cross shone upon the Baltic shores. How glorious are the memories of those ancient men, whose names are forgotten, for they lived and labored in the distant and unwritten past. Too great to be known, they sit on the height of centuries and look down on fame. * * * The men are dead, and the gods are dead. Naught but their memories remain. Where now is Osiris, who came down upon earth out of love for man, who was killed by the malice of the evil one, who rose again from the grave and became the judge of the dead? Where now is Isis the mother, with the child Horus in her lap? They are dead; they are gone to the land of the shades. To-morrow, Jehovah, you and your son shall be with them." Zeus. Zeus, Jove, or Jupiter, as he is variously called, was the greatest of the sons of gods and held the highest place in the pantheons of Greece and Rome. He was the son of the god Kronos and the goddess Rhea. The gods of Greece, while mostly pure myths, were yet intensely human. In these gods human vices sank to the lowest depths and human virtues rose to the loftiest heights. Zeus was one of the most puerile, one of the most sublime, one of the most depraved and one of the most beneficent of deities. In the words of Andrew Lang, "He is the sum of the religious thought of Hellas, found in the numberless ages between savagery and complete civilization."