Footnotes

[1] “The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, if it is a real advantage, follows unavoidably from the idea of God.  The best Being, he must will the best of good things; the wisest, he must devise plans for that effect; the most powerful, he must bring it about.  None can deny this.”—­THEO.  PARKER, Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion, b. ii. ch. viii. p. 205.

[2] “This institution of religion, like society, friendship, and marriage, comes out of a principle, deep and permanent in the heart:  as humble, and transient, and partial institutions come out of humble, transient, and partial wants, and are to be traced to the senses and the phenomena of life, so this sublime, permanent, and useful institution came out from sublime, permanent, and universal wants, and must be referred to the soul, and the unchanging realities of life.”—­PARKER, Discourse of Religion, b. i. ch. i. p. 14.

[3] “The sages of all nations, ages, and religions had some ideas of these sublime doctrines, though more or less degraded, adulterated and obscured; and these scattered hints and vestiges of the most sacred and exalted truths were originally rays and emanations of ancient and primitive traditions, handed down from, generation to generation, since the beginning of the world, or at least since the fall of man, to all mankind.”—­CHEV.  RAMSAY, Philos.  Princ. of Nat. and Rev. Relig., vol ii. p. 8.

[4] “In this form, not only the common objects above enumerated, but gems, metals, stones that fell from heaven, images, carved bits of wood, stuffed skins of beasts, like the medicine-bags of the North American Indians, are reckoned as divinities, and so become objects of adoration.  But in this case, the visible object, is idealized; not worshipped as the brute thing really is, but as the type and symbol of God.”—­PARKER, Disc. of Relig. b. i. ch. v. p. 50.

[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