blacken the white of the eyes, the teeth, and the shirt, and how came they to redden the lips? The mother is, the author believes, always black, when the child is. Their real blackness is not to be questioned for a moment.
If the author had wished to invent a circumstance to corroborate the assertion, that the Romish Christ of Europe is the Cristna of India, how could he have desired any thing more striking than the fact of the black Virgin and Child being so common in the Romish countries of Europe? A black virgin and child among the white Germans, Swiss, French, and Italians!!!
The Romish Cristna is black in India, black in Europe, and black he must remain—like the ancient Gods of Greece, as we have just seen. But, after all, what was he but their Jupiter, the second person of their Trimurti or Trinity, the Logos of Parmenides and Plato, an incarnation or emanation of the solar power?
I must now request my reader to turn back to the first chapter, and to reconsider what I have said respecting the two Ethiopias and the existence of a black nation in a very remote period. When he has done this, the circumstance of the black God of India being called Cristna, and the God of Italy, Christ, being also black, must appear worthy of deep consideration. Is it possible, that this coincidence can have been the effect of accident? In our endeavours to recover the lost science of former ages, it is necessary that we should avail ourselves of rays of light scattered in places the most remote, and that we should endeavour to re-collect them into a focus, so that, by this means, we may procure as strong a light as possible: collect as industriously as we may, our light will not be too strong.[1]
I think I need say no more in answer to Mr. Maurice’s shouts of triumph over those whom he insultingly calls impious infidels, respecting the name of Cristna having the meaning of black. I will now proceed to his other solemn considerations.
10. The second particular to which Mr. Maurice desires the attention of his reader, is in the following terms: “2d, Let it, in the next place, be considered that Chreeshna, so far from being the son of a virgin, is declared to have had a father and mother in the fiesh, and to have been the eighth child of Devaci and Vasudeva. How inconceivably different this from the sanctity of the immaculate conception of Christ!”
I answer, that respecting their births they differ; but what has this to do with the points wherein they agree? No one ever said they agreed in every minute particular. Yet I think, with respect to their humanity, the agreement continues. I always understood that Jesus was held by the Romish and Protestant Churches to have become incarnate; that the word was made flesh.[2] That is, that Jesus was of the same kind of flesh, at least as his mother, and also as his brothers, Joses, James, &c.[3] If he were not of the flesh of his mother, what was he before the umbilical cord was cut?
It does not appear from the histories, which we have yet obtained, that the immaculate concep-
- ↑ But though the Bull of Osiris was black, the Bull of Europa was white. The story states that Jupiter fell in love with a daughter of Agenor, king of Phœnicia, and Telephassa, and in order to obtain the object of his affections he changed himself into a white bull. After he had seduced the nymph to play with him and caress him in his pasture for some time, at last he persuaded her to mount him, when he fled with her to Crete, where he succeeded in his wishes, and by her he had Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthus. Is it necessary for me to point out to the reader in this pretty allegory the peopling of Europe from Phœnicia, and the allusion in the colour of the Bull, viz. white, to the fair complexions of the Europeans? An ingenious explanation of this allegory may be seen in Drummond’s Origines, Vol. III. p. 84.
- ↑ John, ch. i. ver. 14.
- ↑ I look with perfect contempt on the ridiculous trash which has been put forth to shew that the brothers of Jesus, described in the Gospels, did not mean brothers, but cousins!
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