As the sun is the greatest visible glory in the natural world, so it is selected by the pen of Divine inspiration as the brightest emblem of the Supreme Being--“The Lord God is a sun.” This great luminary has been considered by the Heathen as the representative of the Deity, and as such received religious adoration. According to Mr. Bryant’s system of Ancient Mythology, the worship of fire is nearly as old as the flood, having been propagated by the posterity of Ham, in Egypt, who called themselves Ammonians, and carried this worship with them wherever they went, erecting their _puratheia_, or fire-temples, in all their settlements. It is stated, that fire was the primitive, or at least the principal object of idolatrous worship, and common to all idolaters from the first apostasy at Babel. For the original institution of this sacred fire among the Chaldeans, we must go back to Nimrod, concerning whom the Alexandrian Chronicon asserts, that “the Assyrians called Nimrod, Ninus; this man taught the Assyrians to worship fire.” From the Greeks we may trace it backwards to the Ur of the Chaldeans; on which the learned Classius remarks, that “Ur is the name of a city wherein the sacred fire was conserved and worshipped by the Chaldeans, whence it was called _Ur_, which otherwise signifies _fire_.” Plutarch confesses that the Romans, in the days of Numa, borrowed their worship of fire from the Greeks at Athens and Delphi. Numa built a temple of an orbicular form, to represent, as Plutarch interprets, the system of the heavens; which temple was the conservatory of a holy and perpetual fire, kindled at first by the reflections of the sun-beams, and placed in the centre of the building; the astronomy of that early period placing the sun in the centre of the world. Fire has such an affinity to light, that the same word has sometimes comprehended them both. The _Ur_ of the Chaldeans was _fire_; the _Horus_ of the Egyptians was _light_: and the reason is plain, because fire and light are united at the body of the sun, and by him diffused over the world. If, therefore, we consider fire as called into action by the sun, and bear in mind that the ancient Pythagoreans used the same term ΠΥΡ to denote both fire and the sun,[116] we shall get at the root of most of the heathen mythologic divinity.