Thus semi-civilized man explains away the follies of his childhood, and excuses himself for leaving the ignorant in the outer glooms of a symbolical faith. But does knowledge precede ignorance--the explanation the fable? Or is it reasonable to suppose that a symbol, a type, a myth, was ever worshipped, or that men were ever ashamed of their gods? The Hindu, and indeed many a Christian, still adores the bull and cow, the rock, the river, the idol, the relic, and the actual image; they do not kneel before its metaphysics. The learned explain them into mere deifications. They are, however, still deities to the layman and the esoteric; and any attempt to allegorize them would be held, as in ancient Greece, like the reform of Epicurus, mere Atheism. We must, however, justly to appreciate these ancient dogmas, rebecome the primitive children of earth--man in his infancy.[212] The wisdom of Egypt, the learning of the East are now puerility. But “who knows what luminous proofs were propagated under the disguise of their old idolatry? Who cannot see that imagination, first active faculty of the mind, was fostered by myth, the moral sense by fable, and the first vacillating steps of knowledge were encouraged by precepts now seemingly childish and absurd?” (Dabistan). Confucius was as disposed to primarize secondary causes as his predecessors. Owning that he knew nothing about the gods, he therefore preferred to avoid the subject. The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, who conversed with them, ignored Dualism, their later scheme. Rejecting the images of gods and angels, they worshipped without personification or allegory æthereal fire drawn from the Sun. The universe was their temple, their altars Pyrætheia, or circles of stones, in the centre of which stood the kiblah of their simple ignicolism. The very Puritans of heathenry, they hated the grandiose fanes of the Egyptians, they plundered their magnificent tombs, slew their bestial deities, and devoured their garden gods. Presently symbolism began to intrude upon the simple and primitive faith of Iran. Light and fire, according to Strabo, were worshipped as the fittest emblems of spirit and subtile intelligence. Zoroaster was made to believe in a God, “the Best, Incorruptible, Eternal, Unmade, Indivisible, and most Unlike everything”; in fact, an abstraction, a negative. Yet Hyde, Anquetil du Perron, and other moderns make the Parsee sect to represent with their complicated system of rites and ceremonies, their legion of supernatural beings, powers, and influences, and abstruse Dualism, the pure ignicolism of the old Guebre.