The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
Were expiatory sacrifices, which were renewed every twenty years, and conferred the highest degree of holiness and sanctification on the partakers of those holy mysteries. Prudentius informs us, that in these religious ceremonies the Pagan priests, or whoever was ambitious of obtaining a mystical regeneration, excavated a pit, into which he descended. The pit was then covered over with planks, which were bored full of holes, so that the blood and what not of the goat, bull, or ram that was sacrificed upon them, might trickle through the holes upon the body of the person beneath; who, having been thus sanctified, and born again, was obliged ever after to walk in newness of life; to maintain a conduct of the most inflexible virtue; to show forth God's praise, not only with his lips, but in his life, by giving up himself to God's service; and by walking before him in holiness and righteousness all his days.
Potter, however, in his Antiquities, informs us, that the Athenians had a less offensive way than this to convey the spiritual blessedness of regeneration. The person desirous of it, whether male or female, was slipped through a characteristic part of the female habiliments, and thenceforth recognized as one who had been born again. The only observable coincidence of the Tauribolia with the great sacrifice of Christianity, consists in the fact, that the grossest sense of the terms in which the Pagan obscenity can be described, finds its excuse, if not its sanctification, by its adoption into the text of our New Testament, where we read of "the blood of sprinkling, that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel" (Heb. 12-24); and "sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ," (1 Pet. 1-2). "And if the blood of bulls and goats, and the what-not of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ purge your consciences."
Thus, precisely the same effects of an imaginary spiritual regeneration are ascribed to precisely the same nasty ingredients - blood, &c. - used in precisely the same mode of application - sprinkling. It may be that we, of more civilized times, and more exalted ideas, have acquired the art of producing refined sweets out of these grossness's; but we have no right to forget that our chemistry was entirely unknown to those to whom this language was at first propounded. They who were to be converted by it from their Paganism into the new religion, must have had the one put upon them in the place of the other, without their ever being able to perceive the difference.
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next Chapter 31. Baptism, Including, John the Baptist and St Thomas.