and eternity; in India, China, and Scandinavia, of heaven and
immortality; in the two Americas, of rejuvenescence and freedom from
physical suffering; while in both hemispheres it was the common symbol
of the resurrection, or 'the sign of the life to come;' and, finally, in
all heathen communities, without exception, it was the emphatic type,
the sole enduring evidence, of the Divine Unity. This circumstance alone
determines its extreme antiquity--an antiquity, in all likelihood, long
antecedent to the foundation of either of the three great systems of
religion in the East. And, lastly, we have seen how, as a rule, it is
found in conjunction with a stream or streams of water, with exuberant
vegetation, and with a bill or a mountainous region--in a word, with a
land of beauty, fertility, and joy. Thus it was expressed upon those
circular and sacred cakes of the Egyptians, composed of the richest
materials-of flour, of honey, of milk--and with which the serpent and
bull, as well as other reptiles and beasts consecrated to the service of
Isis and their higher divinities, were daily fed; and upon certain
festivals were eaten with extraordinary ceremony by the people and their
priests. 'The cross-cake,' says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, 'was their
hieroglyph for civilized land;' obviously a land superior to their own,
as it was, indeed, to all other mundane territories; for it was that
distant, traditional country of sempiternal contentment and repose, of
exquisite delight and serenity, where Nature, unassisted by man,
produces all that is necessary for his sustentation."

And this land was the Garden of Eden of our race. This was the Olympus
of the Greeks, where

"This same mild season gives the blooms to blow,
The buds to harden and the fruits to grow."