Forlong - Rivers of Life

16
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
They say justly that he authorized the most horrible massacres and immoralities,
which indeed also characterise most of the tales and lives and characters of so
many of the various early rulers and writers, whom the Hebrews call “men of
God.”
The Koran has also its tale as to its origin. A “pencil of light” wrote its sacred
words, and the angel Gabriel, whom Hepworth Dixon shows us is almost a fourth
person in the Grecian church calendar of their Deities (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Gabriel, Virgin, and last, but not least, the powerful Satan-God), revealed God’s (Ala’s)
writing to Mahomed; Al is of course El or AR or RA, the Sun.
The Bible as a whole, says Protestant Christendom, was written by the Holy
Ghost, one of the three persons of the Christian Trinity; he only used the pens of
various men, and made known to them past and present events, which it was impossible
for them otherwise to know. History forms, however, a large portion of the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and the relations of event sin these do not tally with
other histories, or with each other; and the researches of modern criticism, never
before scientifically applied to what have been ever held up as “sacred writings,”
have shown discrepancies, omissions, and insertions, which have led learned and pious
writers on the subject to decide against the facts, and to declare the writings unhistorical,
as the authors are uncertain, and in many cases quite unknown.
The volume called the Christian Bible was for ages a series of disconnected
manuscripts, transcribed, added to and curtailed, again and again, from 630 B.C. to
the days of printing 1516 A.C., or say for 220 years, and this was no doubt done by
interested and often not perfectly reliable transcribers. Criticism has now shown
that the first portion of the Old Testament only came to light, and that in a very
curious and suspicious manner, in the days of Jeremiah, see Robertson, a strong
writer on this subject—“the Finding of the Book,” in one of Mr. Scott’s very excellent
series. The establishment of the documents as “the law of the Lord” was done
through a noted high priest, Hilkiah, against whom the prophets wrote somewhat.
Hilkiah was, however, evidently determined to establish priestly rule and church
revenues; for Solomon’s temple, then and for seventy years before, dedicated to Phallic,
Sun, and Fire worship, required all the hierarchical paraphernalia, as tithes, offering,
vestments, and sacrifices, which that “book of the law” would give to Hilkiah, if he
could but get it accepted as the “law of the Lord.” This, the writing called
“Chronicles” accordingly states, and on the authority of some woman called
”Huldah the prophetess,” never heard of before or since, Hilkiah’s book became sacred
and his church rich. Many of the Old Testament books contain the writings of
generally good men, who denounce the vices of their times, and of their own people
in particular, and foretell, in flowery language, what they thought of the rise and fall
of the men and nations with which they were acquainted.
The Old Testament, as Christians have it, is, according to Jewish writers, imperfect,