Baptism itself is claimed by all its Christian votaries as regenerating or imparting a new spiritual life; and this new spiritual life was believed by several nations, as before stated, to make its appearance in the character and shape of a bird--sometimes a pigeon, sometimes a dove; and thus the origin of this tradition is most clearly and unmistakably exposed. As the foregoing historical exposition exhibits the Holy Ghost as performing several distinct and discordant offices, so we likewise find it possessing at least two distinct genders, the masculine and neuter, i. e., no gender--changing, ghost-like, from one to the other, as occasion seemed to require. From all these metamorphoses it is shown and demonstrated that the sexual and other changes of this "mysterious" being equal many of the demigods of mythology. The primary windy conception of the Holy Ghost is traceable to that early period of society when the rude and untutored denizens of the earth, in their profound ignorance of natural causes, were very easily and naturally led into the belief that wherever there was motion there was a God, or the active manifestation of a God, whether it was in the wind, breath, water, fire, or the sun. Hence, the Buddhists had their god _Vasus_ who manifested himself variously in the shape or character of fire, wind, storms, gas, ghosts, gusts, and the breath, thus constituting a very nearly-allied counterpart to the Christian Holy Ghost, which Mr. Parkhurst tells us originally meant "air in motion." This god was believed to have sprung from the supreme, primordial God, which the ancient Brahmins and Buddhists generally believed was constituted of a fine, spiritual substance,--aura, anima, wind, ether, igneous fluid, or electrical fire, i. e., fire from the sun, giving rise to "baptism by fire" and hence, the third God, or third member of the Trinity, subsequently arising out of this compound being, was also necessarily composed of or consisted of the same properties--all of which were believed to be correlated, if not identical. Such is a complete, though brief, historical elucidation of that mysterious, imaginary being so corporally intangible that Faustus, of the third century, declared respecting it, "The Holy Spirit, the third majesty, has the air for his residence." And it is a fabulous God whose scriptural biography is invested with so many ludicrous and abstruse incidents as to incite several hundred Christian writers to labor hard with a "godly zeal," by a reconstruction of "God's Word" and a rehabiliment of the ghostly texts, to effect some kind of a reconciliation of the story with reason and common sense--with what success the reader is left to judge. THE UNPARDONABLE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.