ven of the native country of Abarras by the
Greeks, it is evident that it could have been none other than Ireland.

Although at this time in their history, Apollo the sun-god was the Deity
worshipped in Greece and in Ireland, still both nations honored Latona
his mother. The same as in the mother country (Persia, or Phoenicia),
the oracles, or sybils of Ireland, had prophesied a "Savior," and three
hundred years before Greek emissaries visited that country, its people,
through the preaching of Eastern missionaries, had substituted for the
worship of Latona and Apollo that of the new solar incarnation--the
third son of Zarathustra, whose appearance had been heralded by a star.

The identity of the symbols used by the early people of Ireland who were
sun worshippers, and those employed in that country for ages after
the Romish Church had usurped the ecclesiastical authority, has been
a subject for much comment. After describing the peculiar form of the
early Christian Churches and the attention paid to the placing of
the windows which were to admit the sun's rays, Smedley says: "It
is possible, in an age of allegory and figures, this combination and
variety expressed some sacred meaning with which we are unacquainted at
present."

The similarity observed in the sacred festivals and religious seasons
of the ancient inhabitants of Ireland and those of the early Christians,
the extent to which large stone crosses, lighted candles, the yule log
and the various other symbols belonging to fertility, or sun worship,
were retained by Christianity, furnish strong evidence of the fact that
the latter system is but part and parcel of the former.

CHAPTER XVI. STONES OR COLUMNS AS THE DEITY.

"Throughout all the world, the first object of idolatry seems to have
been a plain unwrought stone, placed in the ground as an emblem of the
generative or procreative powers of Nature."(157)

157) Celtic Druids, ch. vi., p. 209.

In the language of symbolism the upright stone prefigures either a man,
reproductive energy, or a god, all of which at a certain stage in
the human career had come to mean one and the same thing; namely, the
Creator.

In the earlier ages of male worship, upright stones as emblems of the
Deity were plain unwrought shafts, but in process of time they began
to be carved into the form of a man--a man who usually represented the
ruler or chief of the people, and who, as he was the source of all power
an