th, and gladdening the hearts of man. And there
is more connection between the Son and the Sun than ordinary Christians
imagine.

THE RISING SON.

You are requested to read the above title carefully. Notice the spelling
of the last word. It is _son_, not _sun_. The difference to the eye is
only in one letter. The substantial difference is very great. Yet in the
end the distinction between the Son and the Sun vanishes. Originally
they were one and the same thing, and they will be so again when
Christianity is properly understood.

Supposing that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived, it is impossible to know,
with any approach to accuracy, what he really was. With the exception of
four epistles by Saint Paul--in which we find a highly mystical Christ,
and not a portrait or even a sketch of an actual man--we have no
materials for a biography of Jesus written within a hundred years of
his death. Undoubtedly _some_ documents existed before the Canonical and
Apocryphal Gospels, but they were lost through neglect or suppression,
and what we have is simply the concoction of older materials by an
unscrupulous Church.

During the interval between the real or supposed death of Jesus and the
date of the gospels, there was plenty of time for the accumulation of
any quantity of mythology. The east was full of such material, only
waiting, after the destruction of the old national religions under the
sway of Rome, to be woven into the texture of a non-national system as
wide as the limits of the Empire.

Protestants are able to recognise a vast deal of Paganism in the
teaching and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. On that side they keep
an open eye. On the other side their eye is shut. If they opened it they
would see plenty of Paganism in the gospels.

The only fixed date in the career of Jesus is his birthday. This is
known by every scholar to be fictitious. The primitive Church was
ignorant of the day on which Jesus was born. But what was unknown to
the apostles, one of whom is said to have been his very brother, was
opportunely discovered by the Church three hundred years afterwards.
For some time the nativity of Jesus had been celebrated on all sorts
of days, but the Church brought about uniformity by establishing the
twenty-fifth of December. This was the Pagan festival of the nativity of
the Sun. The Church simply appropriated it, in order to bring over the
Pagan population by a change of doctrine without a change or rit