understood as a poetical and figurative expression! Undoubtedly the scriptures often oppose to that natural emblem or veil of divine power, in the pure elements, an evil, subterraneous and destructive fire--the false light of the fiends of error--the poisonous breath of moral contagion. And how could it be otherwise? Nature in its origin was nought else than a beautiful image--a pure emanation--a wonderful creation--a sport of omnipotent love; so, when it was severed from its divine original, internally displaced, and turned against its Maker, it became vitiated in its substance, and fraught with evil. This alienation of Nature from God, this inversion of the right order in the relations between God and Nature, was the peculiar, essential and fundamental error of ancient Paganism, its false Mysteries, and the abusive application of the higher powers of Nature in magical rites. On the other hand, we ought to regard every similar inversion of things and of ideas, every similar derangement in the divine system, though established on the basis of Christianity, and by Christian philosophers--we ought, I say, to regard every such attempt as being in its essential nature and principle a heathen enterprise--the foundation of a scientific Paganism, although no altars be erected to Apollo, and no Mysteries be celebrated in honour of Isis.[61] The pure symbolism of Nature, and the whole circle of the primitive symbolical ideas of the Egyptians, several of the Greek writers attempted to gather out of the mass of idolatrous tenets, natural emblems, and hieroglyphic signs of speech; but their researches do not correspond to the importance of the subject itself, nor to the present demands of science. It is well worthy of remark that the hieroglyphics, as far as they have yet been deciphered, do not indicate in their formation that variety of epochs observable in the Chinese system of writing; but on the contrary they seem to be all of a single cast, and offer the same circle of ideas and the same style of emblems. And as images of Gods are to be found in a diminutive form among the other hieroglyphic signs, we may conclude from this circumstance, that all the hieroglyphics must have had a simultaneous origin, and have remained subsequently unchanged; and that their origin must have occurred at a time when the Egyptian idolatry had already been wrought into a perfect system.