ty, they had not become so regardless of the truths of Nature as
to attempt to construct a Creator independently of its most essential
factor.

Protestant Christianity, probably the most intensely masculine of all
religious schemes which have claimed the attention of man, has not
wittingly retained any of the detested female emblems, yet so deeply
has the older symbolism taken root, that even in the architecture of the
modern Protestant church with its ark-shaped nave and its window toward
the rising sun, may be detected the remnants of that early worship which
the devotees of this more recently developed form of religious faith so
piously ignore.

The large number of upright columns, circles of stone, cromlechs
and cairns still extant in the British Isles, bears testimony to the
peculiar character of the religious worship which once prevailed in
them. Of these shrines perhaps none is more remarkable than that of
Stonehenge, in England. Although during the numberless ages which have
passed since this temple was erected many of the stones have fallen from
their original places, still by the light of more recently established
facts concerning religious symbolism, it has been possible, even under
its present condition of decay, for scholars to unravel the hitherto
mysterious significance of this remarkable structure. Stonehenge is
composed of four circles of mammoth upright shafts twenty feet high, the
one circle within the other, with immense stones placed across them like
architraves.

In ancient symbolism the circle was the emblem of eternity, or of the
eternal female principle. Mountains were also sacred to the gods. It has
been said that a ring of mountains gave rise to these circular temples.
Faber assures us that a circular stone temple was called the circle
of the world or the circle of the ark, that it represented at once the
inclosure of the Noetic Ship; the egg from which creation was produced;
the earth, and the zodiacal circle of the universe in which the sun
performs its annual revolutions through the signs. Stonehenge is said
to be the temple of the water god Noah, who, as we have seen, was first
worshipped as half woman and half fish or serpent, but who finally came
to be regarded as a man serpent (or fish) Deity.

On approaching Stonehenge from the Northeast, the first object which
engages the attention is a rude boulder, sixteen feet high, in a leaning
posture. This stone has been named the Friar's He