The Bible: What It Is!. Bradlaugh Charles

indiscriminately used in reference to the same persons.

      In the twenty-second chapter, the angel of the Lord calls from heaven to Abraham. What are angels? Voltaire says —

      'Angel, in Greek, envoy. The reader will hardly be the wiser for being told that the Persians had their peris, the Hebrews their melakim, and the Greeks their demonoi.

      'But it is, perhaps, better worth knowing that one of the first of man's ideas has always been, to place intermediate beings between the Divinity and himself; such were those demons, those genii, invented in the ages of antiquity. Man always made the Gods after his own image; princes were seen to communicate their orders by messengers; therefore, the Divinity had also his couriers. Mercury and Iris were couriers or messengers. 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 Raphael, who travelled with his son to assist him in recovering the money due to him from the Jew Gabael.

      '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.

      'But, in the histories of the Jews, they are much spoken of. The angels were 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?

      'The ancient Jewish tradition, according to Ben Maimon, admits ten degrees, ten orders of angels.

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

      'It is not known precisely where the angels dwell – whether in the air, in the void, or in the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.'

      Chapter xvii., v. 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. According to the latter verse, no uncircumcised man will be admitted into heaven; so the Mahomedans would get in and Christians be excluded. The following will be found in the Philosophical Dictionary under the head 'Circumcision.' '"It appears," says Herodotus, in his book Euterpe, 'that the inhabitants of Colchis sprang from Egypt. I judge so from my own observations, rather than from hearsay; for I found that, at Colchis, the ancient Egyptians were more frequently recalled to my mind than the ancient customs of Colchis were, when I was in Egypt.

      '"These inhabitants of the shores of the Euxine sea stated themselves to be a colony founded by Sesostris. As for myself, I should think this probable, not merely because they are dark and wooly-haired, but because the inhabitants of Colchis, Egypt, and Ethiopia, are the only people in the world who, from time immemorial, have practised circumcision; for the Phoenicians and the people of Palestine confess that they adopted the practice from the Egyptians. The Syrians, who at present inhabit the banks of Thermodon, acknowledge that it is, comparatively, but recently that they have conformed to it. It is principally from this usage that they are considered of Egyptian origin.

      '"With respect to Ethiopia and Egypt, as this ceremony is of great antiquity in both nations, I cannot by any means ascertain which has derived it from the other. It is, however, probable that the Ethiopians received it from the Egyptians; while, on the contrary, the Phoenicians have abolished the practice of circumcising new-born children since the enlargement of their commerce with the Greeks."