their exaggerations they intimate how in the background of man's vision
lay a paradise of holy joy--a paradise secured from every kind of
profanation, and made inaccessible to the guilty; a paradise full of
objects that were calculated to delight the senses and to elevate the
mind a paradise that granted to its tenant rich and rare immunities, and
that fed with its perennial streams the tree of life and immortality."

To quote again from the writer in the Edinburgh Review, already cited;

"Its undoubted antiquity, no less than its extraordinary diffusion,
evidences that it must have been, as it may be said to be still in
unchristianized lands, emblematical of some fundamental doctrine or
mystery. The reader will not have failed to observe that it is most
usually associated with water; it was 'the key of the Nile,' that
mystical instrument by means of which, in the popular judgment of his
Egyptian devotees, Osiris produced the annual revivifying inundations of
the sacred stream; it is discernible in that mysterious pitcher or vase
portrayed on the brazen table of Bembus, before-mentioned, with its four
lips discharging as many streams of water in opposite directions; it was
the emblem of the water-deities of the Babylonians in the East and of
the Gothic nations in the West, as well as that of the rain-deities
respectively of the mixed population in America. We have seen with what
peculiar rites the symbol was honored by those widely separated races in
the western hemisphere; and the monumental slabs of Nineveh, now in the
museums of London and Paris, show us how it was similarly honored by the
successors of the Chaldees in the eastern. . . .

ANCIENT IRISH CROSS--PRE-CHRISTIAN--KILNABOY.

"In Egypt, Assyria, and Britain it was emblematical of creative power