In the preceding page I have quoted a passage from Sanchoniathon, which seems to indicate the mode in which the mixed system arose; but there "Cronos" (Noah) is deified in the planet Saturn. As a rule, however, we find him deified in the sun (Bryant, ii. 60, 200, 220). Ham, however, is sometimes also deified in the sun; and in cases where Ham is so deified, it is not unlikely that we shall find the patriarch relegated to Saturn. L'Abbé Gainet, in another part of his work, draws attention to the worship of ancestors in China, and asks whether the idols of Laban had reference to more than some such secondary objects? It will be recollected that it was precisely the extent to which this veneration was to be considered culpable which was the subject-matter of the unfortunate disputes between certain religious orders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (_vide_ Huc's "Chinese Empire," and Cretineau Joly's "Hist. de la Com. de Jesus," vol. iii. chap. iii., and vol. v. chap. i.) Indeed, among the Semitic races it may never have degenerated into idolatry. Still it appears to me that weight should be attached to this tendency, more especially in primitive times, when the recollection of ancestors who had been driven out of Paradise, to whom direct revelations had been made, and who were naturally reputed to have been "nearer to the gods" (Plato, Cicero[131]), would have been all in all to their descendants. Then, again, as we have just seen, there was the tradition among them of one man who had been carried up into heaven, and accordingly, when hero-worship culminated in the deification of man, we are not surprised to find it taking the form of this apotheosis as in the identification of Nimrod and Enoch. [131] "Quoniam antiquitas proxime accedit ad deos."--_De Legibus_, ii. 11.