Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Iradwai, the great Barmes River; Iravat was the name of Indra’s elephant, and is
translated “Rain-bearer;” the river Rāve in the Panjāb is derived from the same source.
There are few solar names which are not deducible from the root meanings of Sun,
viz., “Serpent,” “God,” “The One,” “The Pillar or High One,” “The Upright,” or as
we now mean by this, “The Just or Righteous One,” the circle or Disk, IOni, &c.,
although these last are feminine. Look, for instance, at the solar titles:
Endymion
= En-dem-ion
= En-dev-IOn
= The One God ION
Hyperion
= Up-er-IOn
= Op-el-IOn
= Serpent Sun ION
Perseus
= P’-el-theus
= Pi-el-God
= Serpent Sun-God, or Oracular Sun.
Ion, pronounced Eeon, Iar or I-Ar, are Keltic names for God and also Sun. 1
In this we must always bear in mind that few people of old cared to discriminate
between the pronunciation of an l, r, and t; and that a, e, and even u and o were
used as indifferently as we do in Sun and Son, the former indeed easily slipping into
Sar or Sul. So De—the Sanskrit Dev—God, becomes The; and One was anciently En.
Had man worshipped nought less noble and elevating than the sun he would
have done well; for he eould adore nothing greater save the Supreme Creator of the
sun. To the orb itself we owe the origin and embodiment of all those high ideal forms
of God and his works, which the cultured intellect has wrought into a higher religion, but
which did not in the Jewish mind of pre-Christian days rise much beyond such beautiful
solar hymns, psalms, and prayers as we find interspersed through the Old Testament,
and of which one example comes to mind in the “Elohim which came from
Teman, and the Holy one from Mount Paran,” as Habakkuk says, though he, too.
called his Elohim “a mighty stone.” 2
As men are, so will their ideas of God be; each one, acoording to his cultivation
and idiosyncrasies, projects on his mental canvas the highest ideal of the
Illimitable of which he is capable,—a task which all good priests and churches
endeavour to perform when they represent their gods and prophets as perfect,
though the latter are too often glorified at the expense of all historical and
scientific truth, and the god-idea too frequently degraded to accord with the stories
of the prophet. A late powerful writer 3 urges that the Roman Catholic Church, (apparently
his) properly administered, should, not concern itself with the truth of the facts
of Christ’s life; nay, that it matters not very greatly to that Church whether
Christ ever lived at all. It is the church’s province, he says, simply to teach the
highest goodness and perfection, and show forth to evil men an incarnate ideal of God.
Paul and others, it is evident, did this, and so do all Christians who receive the socalled
historical parts of the Bible “on faith.” Early religionists never questioned or
critically sifted the history and miracles of Christ or other prophets, but on the con-
1 I-ar is also “God” in the Dravidian language of Southern India.
2 Hab. iii., The Prayers to the Sun-God; and i. 12, “the mighty Rock.”
3 Keys of the Creeds, Trübner, 1875.