* The Greeks used to express by X, or Spanish iota, the aspirated ha of the Orientals, who said haris.  In Hebrew heres signifies the sun, but in Arabic the meaning of the radical word is, to guard, to preserve, and of haris, guardian, preserver.  It is the proper epithet of Vichenou, which demonstrates at once the identity of the Indian and Christian Trinities, and their common origin.  It is manifestly but one system, which divided into two branches, one extending to the east, and the other to the west, assumed two different forms:  Its principal trunk is the Pythagorean system of the soul of the world, or Iou-piter.  The epithet piter, or father, having been applied to the demi-ourgos of Plato, gave rise to an ambiguity which caused an enquiry to be made respecting the son of this father.  In the opinion of the philosophers the son was understanding, Nous and Logos, from which the Latins made their Verbum.  And thus we clearly perceive the origin of the eternal father and of the Verbum his son, proceeding from him (Mens Ex Deo nata, says Macrobius):  the oenima or spiritus mundi, was the Holy Ghost; and it is for this reason that Manes, Pasilides, Valentinius, and other pretended heretics of the first ages, who traced things to their source, said, that God the Father was the supreme inaccessible light (that of the heaven, the primum mobile, or the aplanes); the Son the secondary light resident in the sun, and the Holy Ghost the atmosphere of the earth (See Beausob. vol.  II, p. 586):  hence, among the Syrians, the representation of the Holy Ghost by a dove, the bird of Venus Urania, that is of the air.  The Syrians (says Nigidius de Germaico) assert that a dove sat for a certain number of days on the egg of a fish, and that from this incubation Venus was born:  Sextus Empiricus also observes (Inst.  Pyrrh. lib. 3, c. 23) that the Syrians abstain from eating doves; which intimates to us a period commencing in the sign Pisces, in the winter solstice.  We may farther observe, that if Chris comes from Harisch by a chin, it will signify artificer, an epithet belonging to the sun.  These variations, which must have embarrassed the ancients, prove it to be the real type of Jesus, as had been already remarked in the time of Tertullian.  “Many, says this writer, suppose with greater probability that the sun is our God, and they refer us to the religion of the Persians.”  Apologet. c. 16.

     ** See a curious ode to the sun, by Martianus Capella,
     translated by Gebelin.

Here a great murmur having arisen among all the Christian groups, the Lamas, the Mussulmans and the Indians called them to order, and the orator went on to finish his discourse: