the cross as well.  The decoration of the cross with flowers, specially at Easter-tide, was practised in the solar temples, and there the phallus, upright on the altar, was garlanded with spring blossoms, and was adored as the “Lord and Giver of Life, proceeding from the Father,” and indeed one with him, his very self.  The sacred books of the Egyptians were written by the god Thoth, just as the sacred books of the Christians were written by the god the Holy Ghost.  The rosary and cross were used by Buddhists in Thibet and Tartary.  The head of the religion in those countries, the Grand Llama, is elected by the priests of a certain rank, as the Pope by his Cardinals.  The faithful observe fasts, offer sacrifice for the dead, practise confession, use holy water, honour relics, make processions; they have monasteries and convents, whose inmates take vows of poverty and chastity; they flagellate themselves, have priests and bishops—­in fact, they carry out the whole system of Catholicism, and have done so, since centuries before Christ, so that a Roman Catholic priest, on his first mission among them, exclaimed that the Devil had invented an imitation of Christianity in order to deceive and ruin men.  As with baptism, the imitation is older than the original!

“The rites and institutions, by which the Greeks, Romans, and other nations, had formerly testified their religious veneration for fictitious deities, were now adopted, with some slight alterations, by Christian bishops, and employed in the service of the true God. [This is the way a Christian writer accounts for the resemblance his candour forces him to confess; we should put it, that Christianity, growing out of Paganism, naturally preserved many of its customs.]....  Hence it happened that in these times the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed very little in its external appearance from that of the Christians.  They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual.  Gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, gold and silver vases, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were equally to be seen in the heathen temples and the Christian churches” (Mosheim’s “Eccles.  Hist.,” fourth century, p. 105).  Says Dulaure:  “These two Fathers [Justin and Tertullian] are in no fashion embarrassed by this astonishing resemblance; they both say that the devil, knowing beforehand of the establishment of Christianity, and of the ceremonies of this religion, inspired the Pagans to do the same, so as to rival God and injure Christian worship” ("Histoire Abregee de Differens Cultes,” t. i., p. 522; ed. 1825).