heir mimics, the spiritualists, seizing this idea, applied it to their
Demi-Ourgos, and making it a substance distinct and self-existent, they
called it mens or logos (reason or word). And, as they likewise admitted
the existence of the soul of the world, or solar principle, they found
themselves obliged to compose three grades of divine beings, which were:
first, the Demi-Ourgos, or working god; secondly, the logos, word
or reason; thirdly, the spirit or soul (of the world).* And here,
Christians! is the romance on which you have founded your trinity; here
is the system which, born a heretic in the temples of Egypt, transported
a pagan into the schools of Greece and Italy, is now found to be
good, catholic, and orthodox, by the conversion of its partisans, the
disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, to Christianity.

* These are the real types of the Christian Trinity.

"It is thus that God, after having been, First, The visible and various
action of the meteors and the elements;

"Secondly, The combined powers of the stars, considered in their
relations to terrestrial beings;

Thirdly, These terrestrial beings themselves, by confounding the symbols
with their archetypes;

Fourthly, The double power of nature in its two principal operations of
producing and destroying;

"Fifthly, The animated world, with distinction of agent and patient, of
effect and cause;

"Sixthly, The solar principle, or the element of fire considered as the
only mover;

"Has thus become, finally, in the last resort, a chimerical and abstract
being, a scholastic subtilty, of substance without form, a body without
a figure, a very delirium of the mind, beyond the power of reason to
comprehend. But vainly does it seek in this last transformation to elude
the senses; the seal of its origin is imprinted upon it too deep to be
effaced; and its attributes, all borrowed from the physical attributes
of the universe, such as immensity, eternity, indivisibility,
incomprehensibility; or on the moral affections of man, such as
goodness, justice, majesty; its names* even, all derived from the
physical beings which were its types, and especially from the sun, from
the planets, and from the world, constantly bring to mind, in spite of
its corrupters, indelible marks of its real nature.

* In our last analysis we found all the names of the Deity
to be derived from some material object in which it was
supposed to reside. We have given a