Forlong - Rivers of Life

188
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
the minds of the first setters-up of them, the mass of the people soon came to lose
the original idea, seeing in them only the emblems of generation and gestation.
The Jews, say several old writers, adored Noah under the emblema of a man, ark and
serpent, thus adding the necessary concomitants, heat, fire or passion. There was,
says tradition, also a curious early worship of blood—the blood of Abel, which is still
the worship of men of the Moody and Sankey class. The Jews continually spoke of the
blood of righteous Abel. It took the place on many occasions of the “Stone of Swearing”—Jhavh
Fœderis; all good Sethians swore on it, just as they also did on the thigh,
as we see in the learned Gregorie’s Notes on Scripture, page 119 et seq., quoting
the erudite “Master Selden and others.” Here also we get the prayer which Sethians
used to “offer daily before the body of Adam,” which as the volume is now rare, I
will give some details concerning; but will my readers kindly remember in reading it
—that which the writers forget, that the word “Adām” signifies lingam. It appears
from both the Sabid Aben Batric and the Arabic Caterna that there existed the
following “short litany, said to have been conceived by Noah;” and that these
Sethites used to say their prayers daily in the Ark before the body of Adam, and “in
the name of the blood” of Abel so that he was the early Christ. This is given to us
by tradition quite as good as any on which churches rely.
PRAYER OF NOAH.
“O Lord, excellent art thou in thy truth, and there is nothing great in comparison of thee. Look
upon us with the eye of mercy and compassion. Deliever us from this deluge of waters, and set our feet
in a large room. By the sorrows of Adam, thy first-made man; by the blood of Abel thy holy one;
by the righteousness of SETH, in whom thou art well-pleased; number us not amongst those who
have transgressed thy statutes, but take us into thy merciful care; for thou art our Deliverer, and thine
is the praise for all the works of thy hand for evermore. And the sons of NOAH said Amen, Lord.”
The learned and pious Gregorie then goes on to account for the body of Adam
being above ground in this year of the flood, said to have been 2348 B.C.; for even
allowing to him the mythical age of 930 years, still he had by that time been dead
7¼ centuries. 1 It appears, however, that well-estabIiahed traditional story affirms
that the great ancestor’s “dead body should be kept above ground, till a fullness of
time snould come to commit it to the middle of the earth by a priest of the most high
God.” 2 Now “the priest who was to officiate at the funeral, they say, was Melchise-
1 According to Usher:—
Creation . . . .
Adam’s life . . .
Adam’s death . .
Flood . . . . .
4004
930
——
3074
2348
——
726
2 We require to accustom ourselves to Scriptural
inaccuraices. Thus, if the figures in Gen.
v. 37 are correct, poor Methusaleh was swimming
about outisde the Ark all the time it was afloat,
and wandering about in dismal salt water swamps
for some 1½ months more, as any careful calculator
may observe from Gen. iv. 27 and vii. 11.
By our calculations, the period of his watery wanderings
was 17 years.