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that, from this theology, the Jews and Christians at length took the idea that the evil angels had been driven out of heaven, and that their prince had tempted Eve in the form of a serpent.

It has been pretended that Isaiah, in his fourteenth chapter, had this allegory in view when he said: Quomodò occidisti de cælo, Lucifer, qui manè oriebaris?— "How hast thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning?"

Homer were-celestial beings, subordinate to a supreme being. The imagination which produced the one, probably. produced the other. The number of the inferior gods increased with the religion of Homer. Among the Christians, the number of the angels was augmented in the course of time.

The writers known by the names of Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory I. fixed the number of angels in nine choirs, It was this same Latin verse, trans-forming three hierarchies; the first conlated from Isaiah, which procured for the sisting of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Devil the name of Lucifer. It was for- Thrones; the second of the Denominagotten that Lucifer signifies that which tions, Virtues and Powers; and the third sheds light. The words of Isaiah, too, of the Principalities, Archangels, and, have received a little attention: he is lastly, the Angels, who give their denospeaking of the dethroned king of Baby-mination to all the rest. It is hardly al

lon; and, by a common figure of speech, he says to him: How hast thou fallen from heaven, thou brilliant star?

lowable for any one but a pope, thus to settle the different ranks in heaven.

SECTION III.

It does not at all appear that Isaiah sought, by this stroke of rhetoric, to es- Angel, in Greek, envoy, The reader tablish the doctrine of the angels precipi-will hardly be the wiser for being told tated into hell. It was scarcely before that the Persians had their peris, the Hethe time of the primitive Christian church brews their malakim, and the Greeks their that the fathers and the rabbis exerted demonoi. themselves to encourage this doctrine, in But it is perhaps better worth knowing, order to save the incredibility of the story that one of the first of man's ideas has alof a serpent which seduced the mother of ways been, to place intermediate beings men, and which, condemned for this bad between the Divinity and himself; such action to crawl on its belly, has ever since were those demons, those genii, invented been an enemy to man, who is always in the ages of antiquity. Man always striving to crush it, while it is always en- made the Gods after his own image; deavouring to bite him. There seemed princes were seen to communicate their to be somewhat more of sublimity in ce-orders by messengers; therefore, the Dilestial substances precipitated into the vinity had also his couriers. Mercury, abyss, and issuing from it to persecute Iris, were couriers or messengers.

mankind.

It cannot be proved by any reasoning that these celestial and infernal powers exist; neither can it be proved that they do not exist. There is certainly no contradiction in acknowledging the existence of beneficent and malignant substances which are neither of the nature of God tor of the nature of man: but a thing, to be believed, must be more than possible. The angels who, according to the Babylatians and the Jews, presided over Abons, were precisely what the gods of

The Jews, the only people under the conduct of the Divinity himself, did not at first give names to the angels whom God vouchsafed to send them; they borrowed the names given them by the Chaldeans when the Jewish nation was captive in Babylon; Michael and Gabriel are named for the first time by Daniel, a slave among those people. The Jew Tobit, who lived at Nineveh, knew the angel Raphaël, who travelled with his son to assist him in recovering the money due to him from the Jew Gabaël.

In the laws of the Jews, that is, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, not the least mention is made of the existence of the angels-much less of the worship of them. Neither did the Sadducees believe in the angels.

Eve, and damned mankind. Jesus cam to redeem mankind, and to triumph ove the devil, who tempts us still. Yet this fundamental tradition is to be found nowhere but in the apocryphal book of Enoch; and there it is in a form quite different from that of the received tradi

But in the histories of the Jews, they are much spoken of. The angels weretion. corporeal; they had wings at their backs, as the Gentiles feigned that Mercury had at his heels; sometimes they concealed their wings under their clothing. How could they be without bodies, since they all ate and drank, and the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to commit the sin of pederasty with the angels who went to Lot's house?

The ancient Jewish tradition, according to Ben Maimon, admits ten degrees, ten orders of angels:-1. The chaios ecodesh, pure, holy. 2. The famin, swift. 3. The oralim, strong. 4. The chasmalim, flames. 5. The seraphim, sparks. 6. The malakim, angels, messengers, deputies. 7. The elohim, gods or judges. 8. The ben elohim, sons of the gods. 9. The cherubim, images. 10. The ychim, animated.

St. Augustin, in his 109th letter, does not hesitate to give slender and agile bodies to the good and bad angels. Pope Gregory I. has reduced to nine choirsto nine hierarchies or orders, the ten choirs of angels acknowledged by the Jews.

The Jews had in their temple two cherubs, each with two heads-the one that of an ox, the other that of an eagle, with six wings. We paint them now in the form of a flying head, with two small wings below the ears. We paint the augels and archangels in the form of young men, with two wings at the back. As for the thrones and dominations, no one has yet thought of painting them.

St. Thomas, at question eviii. article 2, says, that the Thrones are as near to God as the Cherubim and the Seraphim, beThe story of the Fall of the Angels is cause it is upon them that God sits. Scot not to be found in the books of Moses. has counted a thousand million of angels. The first testimony respecting it is that of The ancient mythology of the good and Isaiah, who, apostrophising the King of bad genii, having passed from the East to Babylon, exclaims, "Where is now the Greece and Rome, we consecrated this exactor of tributes? The pines and the opinion, for admitting for each individual cedars rejoice in his fall. How hast thou a good and an evil angel, of whom one fallen from heaven, O Hellel, star of the assists him and the other torments him, morning?" It has been already observed } from his birth to his death; but it is not that the word Hellel has been rendered yet known whether these good and bad by the Latin word Lucifer; that after- angels are continually passing from one to wards, in an allegorical sense, the name another, or are relieved by others. of Lucifer was given to the prince of the this point, consult St. Thomas's Dream. angels, who made war in heaven; and It is not known precisely where the anthat, at last, this word, signifying Phos-gels dwell-whether in the air, in the void, phorus and Aurora, has become the name or in the planets. It has not been God's of the devil. pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

The Christian religion is founded on the Fall of the Angels. Those who revolted were precipitated from the spheres which they inhabited into hell, in the centre of the earth, and became devils. A devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted

ANNALS.

On

How many nations have long existed, and still exist, without annals. There were none in all America, that is, in one

tiquity, are the Indian, the Chinese, and the Hebrew.

half of our globe, excepting those of Mexico and Peru, which are not very ancient. Besides, knotted cords are a sort We cannot give the name of annals to of books which cannot enter into very vague and rude fragments of history, minute details. Three-fourths of Africa {without date, order, or connection. They never had annals; and, at the presentare riddles proposed by antiquity to posday, in the most learned nations,-interity, who understand nothing at all of those which have even used and abused them.

the art of writing the most, ninety-nine We venture to affirm that Sanchoniaout of a hundred individuals may be re-thon, who is said to have lived before the garded as not knowing anything that hap- time of Moses, composed annals. He pened there farther back than four gene- probably limited his researches to cosmorations, and as almost ignorant of the gony, as Hesiod afterwards did in Greece. names of their great-grandfathers. Such We advance this latter opinion only as a is the case with nearly all the inhabitants doubt; for we write only to be informed, of towns and villages, very few families and not to teach. holding titles of their possessions. When a litigation arises respecting the limits of a field or a meadow, the judges decide according to the testimony of the old men; and possession constitutes the title. Some great events are transmitted from father to Son, and are entirely altered in passing from mouth to mouth. They have no other annals.

are

But what deserves the greatest attention is, that Sanchoniathon quotes the books of the Egyptian Thoth, who, he tells us, lived eight hundred years before him. Now Sanchoniathan probably wrote in the age in which we place Joseph's adventure in Egypt.

We commonly place the epoch of the promotion of the Jew Joseph to the prime-ministry of Egypt at the year of the creation 2,300.

Look at all the villages of our Europe, so polished, so enlightened, so full of immense libraries, and which now seems to groan under the enormous mass of books. In each village, two men at most, on an average, can read and write. Society loses nothing in consequence. All works performed-building, planting, sow, reaping, as they were in the remotest times. The labourer has not even leisure to regret that he has not been taught to Another difficulty is, that Sanchoniaconsume some hours of the day in read-thon does not speak of the Deluge, and ing. This proves that mankind had no that no Egyptian writer has ever been need of historical monuments, to cultivate quoted who does speak of it. But these the arts really necessary to life.

If, then, the books of Thoth were written eight hundred years before, they were written in the year 1500 of the creation. Therefore, their date was a hundred and fifty-six years before the Deluge. They must, then, have been engraven on stone, and preserved in the universal inundation.

It is astonishing, not that so many tribes of people are without annals, but that three or four nations have preserved them for five thousand years or thereabouts, through so many violent revolu

which the earth has undergone. Not a line remains of the ancient Egyp fan, Chaldean, or Persian annals, nor of the of the Latins and Etruscans. The only annals than can boast of a little an

difficulties vanishes before the Book of

Genesis, inspired by the Holy Ghost.

We have no intention here to plunge into the chaos which eighty writers have sought to clear up, by inventing different chronologies: we always keep to the Old Testament.

We only ask, whether in the time of Thoth, they wrote in hierglyphics, or in alphabetical characters?—

Whether stone and brick had yet been

laid aside for vellum, or any other mate-matic Sanction abolished them agai rial?—

Whether Thoth wrote annals, or only a cosmogony ?

Whether there were some pyramids already built in the time of Thoth ?Whether Lower Egypt was already inhabited ?

Whether canals had been constructed to receive the waters of the Nile?

Whether the Chaldeans had already taught the arts of the Egyptians, and whether the Chaldeans had received them from the Brahmins?

There are persons who have resolved all these questions; which once occasioned a man of sense and wit to say of a grave doctor, "That man must be very ignorant, for he answers every question that is asked him."

ANNATS.

THE epoch of the establishment of annats is uncertain; which is a proof that the exaction of them is a usurpation-an extortionary custom. Whatever is not founded on an authentic law, is an abuse. Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself. Usurpation begins by small and successive encroachments; equity and the public interest at length exclaim and protest: then comes policy, which does its best to reconcile usurpation with equity, and the abuse remains.

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Francis I. by a private treaty which made with Leo X. and which was not i serted in the concordat, allowed the po to raise this tribute, which produced h annually, during that prince's reign, hundred thousand crowns of that day, a cording to the calculation then made Jacques Capelle, advocate-general to t parliament of Paris.

The parliament, the universities, t clergy, the whole nation, protested agai this exaction; and Henry II. yieldi at length to the cries of his people, newed the law of Charles VII. by edict of the 3d of September, 1551.

The paying of annats was again f bidden by Charles IX. at the States Orleans, in 1560:-"By the advice our council, and in pursuance of the crees of the Holy Councils, the anci ordinances of the kings our predecess and the decisions of our courts of par ment, we order that all conveying of g and silver out of our kingdom, and p ing of money under the name of ann vacant or otherwise, shall cease, on F of a four-fold penalty on the offenders

This law, promulgated in the gen assembly of the nation, must have seen irrevocable; but, two years afterwa the same prince, subdued by the cour Rome, at that time powerful, re-est lished what the whole nation and him had abrogated.

Henry, IV. who feared no danger,

edict of the 22d of January, 1596.

In several dioceses, the bishops, chapters, and arch-deacons, after the exam-feared Rome, confirmed the annats by ple of the popes, imposed annats upon the cures. In Normandy, this exaction is called droit de déport. Policy having no interest in maintaining this pillage, it was abolished in several places; it still exists in others; so true is it that money is the first object of worship!

In 1409, at the council of Pisa, Pope Alexander V.expressly renounced annats; Charles VII. condemned them by an edict of April, 1418; the council of Basle declared that they came under the denomination of simony; and the Prag

Three celebrated jurisconsults, I moulin, Lannoy, and Duaren, h written strongly against annats, wh they call a real simony, If, in defaul their payment, the pope refuses his bu Duaren advises the Gallican church imitate that of Spain, which, in twelfth council of Toledo, charged archbishop of that city, on the pope's fusal, to provide for the prelates appoin by the king.

It is one of the most certain maxim

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ANTHROPOMORPHITES. ANTI-LUCRETIUS.

83

French law, consecrated by artiele four-painters and sculptors. As soon as they teen of our liberties, that the bishop of could draw a little or shape a figure, they Rame has no power over the temporali- made an image of the Divinity. ties of benefices, but enjoys the revenues If the Egyptians consecrated cats and of annats only by the king's permission. gnats, they also sculptured Isis and Bet ought there not to be a term to this Osiris. Bel was carved at Babylon, Herpermission? What avails our enlighten-cules at Tyre, Brahma at India.

ment, if we are always to retain our abuses?

The Mussulmans did not paint God as a man. The Guebres had no image or the Great Being. The Sabean Arabs did not give the human figure to the stars. The Jews did not give it to God in their temple. None of these nations cultivated the art of design; and if Solomon placed figures of animals in his temple, it is

The amount of the sums which have been and still are paid to the pope, is truly frightful. The attorney-general, Jean de St. Romain, has remarked that, in the time of Pius II. twenty-two bishopricks having become vacant in France in the space of three years, it was neces-likely that he had them carved at Tyre; sary to carry to Rome a hundred and but all the Jews have spoken of God as twenty thousand crowns; that sixty-one of a man. abbeys having also become vacant, the Although they had no images, they like sum had been paid to the court of seem to have made God a man on all ocRome; that, about the same time, there casions. He comes down into the garhad been paid to this court for provisions den; he walks there every day at noon; for the priorships, deaneries, and other he talks to his creatures; he talks to the inferior dignities, a thousand crowns; serpent; he makes himself heard by Mothat for each curate there was at least a ses, in the bush; he shows him only his gráce expectative, which was sold for back parts on the mountain; he nevertwenty-five crowns; besides an infinitetheless talks to him, face to face, like one number of dispensations, amounting to friend to another. two millions of crowns. St. Romain lived in the time of Louis XI. Judge, then, what these sums would now amount to. Judge how much other states have given. Judge whether the Roman commonwealth, in the time of Lucullus, drew more gold and silver from the nations conquered by its sword, than the popes, the fathers of those same nations, have drawn from them by their pens.

In the Koran, too, God is always looked up to as a king. In the twelfth chapter, a throne is given him above the waters. He had this Koran written by a secretary, as kings have their orders. He sent this same Koran to Mahomet, by the angel Gabriel, as kings communicate their orders through the great officers of the crown. In short, although God is declared in the Koran to be neither be

getting nor begotten, there is, nevertheless a morsel of anthropomorphism.

In the Greek and Latin churches, God has always been painted with a great

Supposing that St. Romain's calculation is too high by half, which is very unlikely, does there not still remain a sum sufficiently considerable to entitle us to call the apostolical chamber to an ac-beard. count, and demand restitution,-seeing that there is nothing at all apostolical in such an amount of money?

ANTHROPOMORPHITES.

THEY are said to have been a small sect of the fourth century; but they were rather the sect of every people that had

ANTI-LUCRETIUS.

THE reading of the whole poem of the late Cardinal Polignac has confirmed me in the idea which I formed of it when he read to me the first book. I am moreover astonished that, amidst the dissipations of the world and the troubles in

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