rites and the contemplation of the divine nature.  But the Hebrew word for hare is ARNaBeT.  Now, this is compounded of the two words AUR, light, and NaBaT, to behold, and therefore the word which in the Egyptian denoted initiation, in the Hebrew signified to behold the light.  In two nations so intimately connected in history as the Hebrew and the Egyptian, such a coincidence could not have been accidental.  It shows the prevalence of the sentiment, at that period, that the communication of light was the prominent design of the Mysteries—­so prominent that the one was made the synonyme of the other.[100]

The worship of light, either in its pure essence or in the forms of sun-worship and fire-worship, because the sun and the fire were causes of light, was among the earliest and most universal superstitions of the world.  Light was considered as the primordial source of all that was holy and intelligent; and darkness, as its opposite, was viewed as but another name for evil and ignorance.  Dr. Beard, in an article on this subject, in Kitto’s Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, attributes this view of the divine nature of light, which was entertained by the nations of the East, to the fact that, in that part of the world, light “has a clearness and brilliancy, is accompanied by an intensity of heat, and is followed in its influence by a largeness of good, of which the inhabitants of less genial climates have no conception.  Light easily and naturally became, in consequence, with Orientals, a representative of the highest human good.  All the more joyous emotions of the mind, all the pleasing sensations of the frame, all the happy hours of domestic intercourse, were described under imagery derived from light.  The transition was natural—­from earthly to heavenly, from corporeal to spiritual things; and so light came to typify true religion and the felicity which it imparts.  But as light not only came from God, but also makes man’s way clear before him, so it was employed to signify moral truth, and preeminently that divine system of truth which is set forth in the Bible, from its earliest gleamings onward to the perfect day of the Great Sun of Righteousness.”

I am inclined to believe that in this passage the learned author has erred, not in the definition of the symbol, but in his deduction of its origin.  Light became the object of religious veneration, not because of the brilliancy and clearness of a particular sky, nor the warmth and genial influence of a particular climate,—­for the worship was universal, in Scandinavia as in India,—­but because it was the natural and inevitable result of the worship of the sun, the chief deity of Sabianism—­a faith which pervaded to an extraordinary extent the whole religious sentiment of antiquity.[101]

Light was venerated because it was an emanation from the sun, and, in the materialism of the ancient faith, light and darkness were both personified as positive existences, the one being the enemy of the other.  Two principles were thus supposed to reign over the world, antagonistic to each other, and each alternately presiding over the destinies of mankind.[102]