Look now at the form of the great Egyptian pyramid; and is it not precisely that of the above triangle? Is there not, also, an _aperture_ into it, about the middle as here?[281] And when to all, we add the notion of _wells_ of water withinside, is not the demonstration complete, that the goddess of the _Lotos_, the soft promoter of _desire_, the arbitress of _man_, and the compeer of the _angels_, was the honoured object of its symbolical erection?[282] In 1 Pet. iii. 20, it is asserted that only “eight persons” were preserved in the ark. Let us suppose them to have been Noah and _his_ wife, with his three sons and _their_ wives. At a comparatively short interval after the date assigned to this event,--at most but 352 years,--on Abraham’s arrival in the land of Egypt, we find a flourishing kingdom, an organised police, a systematic legislature, and comprehensive institutions, diffused over its surface. All the other parts of the world, we must be ready to presume, if not equally enlightened, were, at least, as populous; and I put it to your good sense to decide, whether _eight_ individuals could, within that period, not only procreate so plentifully as to replenish the whole earth, but enlighten it, additionally, with such a coruscation of science, as no subsequent era has been since able to eclipse? Indeed, the Scriptures themselves give us, elsewhere, to understand that St. Peter did not correctly interpret this history. “Come thou,” says Gen. vii. 1, “and _all thy house_, into the ark!” This gracious invitation, at so critical a juncture, would have been too welcome a proffer to be lost sight of by anyone who could make it available; and must not we suppose that the _domestics_ to whom the extension was addressed, with their several dependants and collateral offspring, would have been glad and happy to grasp at it with delight? But the name of the type itself is worth a hundred deductions from equivocal premises. The _coffer_ of the law, the _coffin_ of Joseph, the _money chest_ of the temple, are all severally translated _ark_, and recorded in Hebrew by the word ןרוא _aron_: but the “_ark_ of Noah”[283] and Moses’s “ark of bulrushes”[284] are peculiarly designated, תבת _Thebit_, or תבה _tebah_.[285] What is the meaning of these mysterious terms? “Quo spectanda modo, quo sensu credis, et ore?” As the _Tau_ of the Hebrews is, indifferently, in power, _T_ and _Th_, _Thebit_ has as good a right to be spelled with, as without, an _h_ at the end of it,--and, indeed, a better right, considering the elements whereof it is compounded. _Thebith_, then, is the proper and true sound, and the mystery of its import I thus unravel. Its first syllable, _The_, signifies _sacred_ or consecrated;[286] and since the letters _b_ and _p_ are commutable--_bith_ is the same as _pith_, that is, _Cteis_ or _Yoni_. The words _The-bith_, then, together, in all the attraction of truth, intimate the _consecrated Cteis_; or the _sacred Yoni_![287]