Sect. IX.: Religion of Moses, or worship of the soul of the world (You-piter).

“Of this latter description was the Hebrew legislator, who, desirous of separating his nation from every other, and of forming a distinct and exclusive empire, conceived the design of taking for its basis religious prejudices, and of erecting round it a sacred rampart of rites and opinions. But in vain did he proscribe the worship of symbols, the reigning religion, at that time, in Lower Egypt and Phenicia: his God was not on that account the less an Egyptian God, of the invention of those priests whose disciple Moses had been; and Yahouh, detected by his very name, which means essence of beings, and by his symbol, the fiery bush, is nothing more than the soul of the world, the principle of motion, which Greece shortly after adopted under the same denomination in her You-piter, generative principle, and under that of Ei, existence; which the Thebans consecrated by the name of Kneph; which Sais worshipped under the emblem of Isis veiled, with this inscription, I am all that has been, all that is, and all that will be, and no mortal has drawn aside my veil; which Pythagoras honoured under the appellation of Vesta, and which the Stoic philosophy defined with precision, by calling it the principle of fire. In vain did Moses wish to blot from his religion whatever could bring to remembrance the worship of the stars; a multiplicity of traits in spite of his exertions still remained to point it out: the seven lamps of the great candlestick, the twelve stones or signs of the Urim of the high-priest, the feast of the two equinoxes, each of which at that epocha formed a year, the ceremony of the lamb or celestial ram, then at its fifteenth degree; lastly, the name of Osiris even preserved in his song, and the ark or coffer, an imitation of the tomb in which that God was inclosed; all these remain to bear record to the genealogy of his ideas, and their derivation from the common source.”