[5] A recent writer thus eloquently refers to the universality, in ancient times, of sun-worship: "Sabaism, the worship of light, prevailed amongst all the leading nations of the early world. By the rivers of India, on the mountains of Persia, in the plains of Assyria, early mankind thus adored, the higher spirits in each country rising in spiritual thought from the solar orb up to Him whose vicegerent it seems--to the Sun of all being, whose divine light irradiates and purifies the world of soul, as the solar radiance does the world of sense. Egypt, too, though its faith be but dimly known to us, joined in this worship; Syria raised her grand temples to the sun; the joyous Greeks sported with the thought while feeling it, almost hiding it under the mythic individuality which their lively fancy superimposed upon it. Even prosaic China makes offerings to the yellow orb of day; the wandering Celts and Teutons held feasts to it, amidst the primeval forests of Northern Europe; and, with a savagery characteristic of the American aborigines, the sun temples of Mexico streamed with human blood in honor of the beneficent orb."--_The Castes and Creeds of India_, Blackw. Mag., vol. lxxxi. p. 317.--"There is no people whose religion is known to us," says the Abbé Banier, "neither in our own continent nor in that of America, that has not paid the sun a religious worship, if we except some inhabitants of the torrid zone, who are continually cursing the sun for scorching them with his beams."--_Mythology_, lib. iii. ch. iii.--Macrobius, in his _Saturnalia_, undertakes to prove that all the gods of Paganism may be reduced to the sun. [6] "Varro de religionibus loquens, evidenter dicit, multa esse vera, quae vulgo scire non sit utile; multaque, quae tametsi falsa sint, aliter existimare populum expediat."--St. AUGUSTINE, _De Civil. Dei._--We must regret, with the learned Valloisin, that the sixteen books of Varro, on the religious antiquities of the ancients, have been lost; and the regret is enhanced by the reflection that they existed until the beginning of the fourteenth century, and disappeared only when their preservation for less than two centuries more would, by the discovery of printing, have secured their perpetuity. [7] Strabo, Geog., lib. i. [8] Maurice, Indian Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 297. [9] Div. Leg., vol. i. b. ii. § iv. p. 193, 10th Lond. edit. [10] The hidden doctrines of the unity of the Deity and the immortality of the soul were taught originally in all the Mysteries, even those of Cupid and Bacchus.--WARBURTON, apud Spence's _Anecdotes_, p. 309. [11] Isoc. Paneg., p. 59. [12] Apud Arrian. Dissert., lib. iii. c. xxi. [13] Phaedo. [14] Dissert. on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, in the Pamphleteer, vol. viii. p. 53. [15] Symbol. und Mythol. der Alt. Völk.