and isles. These impure faiths seem to have been very strictly
maintained by Jews up to Hezekiah's days, and by none more so than
by dissolute Solomon and his cruel, lascivious bandit-father, the
brazen-faced adulterer and murderer, who broke his freely volunteered
oath, and sacrificed six innocent sons of his king to his Javah."

Of Solomon he says that he devoted his energies and some little wealth
"to rearing phallic and Solophallic shrines over all the high places
around him, and especially in front of Jerusalem, and on and around the
Mount of Olives." On each side of the entrance to his celebrated
temple, under the great phallic spire which formed the portico, were two
handsome columns over fifty feet high, by the side of which were the sun
God Belus and his chariots.

In a description of this temple it is represented as being one hundred
and twenty feet long and forty feet broad, while the porch, a phallic
emblem, "was a huge tower, forty feet long, twenty feet broad, and two
hundred and forty feet high." We are assured by Forlong that Solomon's
temple was like hundreds observed in the East, except that its walls
were a little higher than those usually seen, and the phallic spire out
of proportion to the size of the structure. "The Jewish porch is but
the obelisk which the Egyptian placed beside his temple; the Boodhist
pillars which stood all around their Dagobas; the pillars of Hercules,
which stood near the Phoenician temple; and the spire which stands
beside the Christian Church."(104)

104) Forlong, Rivers of Life, vol. i., p. 219.

The rites and ceremonies observed in the worship of Baal-Peor are not of
a character to be described in these pages: it is perhaps sufficient
to state that by them the fact is clearly established that profligacy,
regulated and controlled by the priestly order as part and parcel of
religion, was not confined to the Gentiles; but, on the contrary, that
the religious observances of the Jews prior to the Babylonian captivity
were even more gross than were those of the Assyrians or the Hindoos.

These impure faiths arose at a time when man as the sole creator of
offspring became god, when the natural instincts of woman were subdued,
and when passion as the highest expression of the divine force came to
be worshipped as the most important attribute of humanity.

The extent to which these faiths have influenced later religious belief
and observances is scarcely realized by