spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of midday and midsummer, and mourned for by the earth till his return in the evening and in autumn. Ashtoreth, the horned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in groves, is the moon and also the evening star; but, like Isis, she seems to gather up in herself the worship of the feminine principle in nature. The Canaanites represented their gods in the temples by symbols instead of by sculptured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in the shrine of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre), symbolized the sun and the masculine element in nature; while the feminine element was figured under the semblance of a grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes apparently a grove outside the temple, and sometimes a mimic grove kept within. There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical conception of God worshipped by all the Semitic peoples of Asia. His name, Il or El, appears to have been for Chaldæans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the nature-gods were approached. Il became a concealed, distant deity, too far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew to be concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen people the name acquired ever new significance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His children. This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, it must be owned, very barren in incident and character. It presents, indeed, no more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes, through whose thin personalities the shapes of natural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus. CHAPTER IX. ARYAN RELIGIONS. [Sidenote: Nature-worship.] That morning speech of Belarius (in _Cymbeline_) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature-religion in its simplest garb: