The Express.
London, England, 1857-05-02 00:00:00

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EXTRAORDINARY HOAX OX d MORXIXO
JOURNAL.

(Front the Saturday Ike ic .)

Any one who may have glanced, during the last
few weeks, at the columns of the Mi,rnitv Adrerfiur, will
have rocas across some most extraordinary allusions to a
very unknown fact in Christian malignity, which must
natunilly hare puzzled him. He will have seen it gravely
stated that the cross, aa • sign of religious worship, is
borrowed from • very different creed from that of
Christianity, and is really the same symbol very slightly
transmuted, which the nations of the pagan world wor-
shipped as representing the productive force of na-
ture. Few persons will have cared to trace whence
this startling theory was borrowed, and fewer Mill
are likely to have given much attention to the letters
which zealous protestants contribute to the organ of pot-
home bigotry. Any one, however, who bu followed the
course of the paper in question will have perceived that it has
been the subject of a hoax to which we should have thought
that no portion of the English press in tlicso days could hare
fallen a prey. The astonialdeg ignorance and err laty dis-
played by the conductors of that journal are, we believe,
without p•ralkl, and it is really ecarecly ereditle that an
attempt so audacious in its tun ...I tepwamoo coup have
succeeded.

The matter began with a leading article on the " Wester.
lon- judgment, in which the journalist lactrayed that h.
had, somehow er other, got into hie head that the worebip of
the eras was beard on that of the phallus, We do not
know from what foolish party writer, or from what lying
historian or antiquary, this absurd conceit was taken; but
it had been received se ■ ftet by the writer, and accordingly
the article to which we refer contained the following pare•
gm*.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the Petry
Council is dawdling with a toy of the pseudo Christians of
the fourth snd fifth. It is unable to comprehend that this
toy, which figured in the indecent proccasions of the Pagans,
I eras a necessary adjunct of the Eleusinian mysteries and the
rites of &Triple and Isle, which has been found in the ruins
of Nineveh, and which may be now seen, with idols and
unmentionable symbols, in the subterranean temple at
Elephants, cannot, without pollution of Christianity, be
accepted as its emblem.
"Their lordships mold have no difficulty in asserting, so
They do, that crosses were in use centuries beton, crueitiziv
and images. It is on record that cremes were found in the
I temple of &Tapia at the destruction of pagan edifiers of that
kind, in pursuance of the Theodoman decree, about the year
TA. Christian antiquaries, on considering these croons,
pronounced them to be 'Emblems of Life.' It would ap-
pear, therefore, that though the sign of the cross
was in common use as early as the middle of
the second century, the cross itself was not placed
in the churches at the end of the fourth age. The next
period was one in which a prodigious shoal of rank heathen-
ism were obtruded upon a religion that had for some time j
put deserved no better a name than pseudo•Chtiutianity.

With them, the mythological ' Emblems of Life' resumed
the stations which thoy had before occupied in the temples
of his and Cybele; and in the processions which, under
other oases, continued the phallephoris, the thestoophoris,
and the orgies of Bacchus and Cones. Thus it wws that the
cross waa received and perpetuated in the pseudo• Christian
ehtuvh."

This tickled the fancy of some malicious wit, and specu-
lating on the credulity of the journalist, he seat on the
following day a letter, under the signature of " Cuntab,"
in whiet, the position was purely defended, and the journal
was thanked for the blow dealt, by the article of the
day before, to the use of those Pagan emblem by which
our Protestant churches are now defaced. The letter
was written with, • great amount of mock learning,
and intervened with frequent to such recondite
anthers as " Diophreates As "+-4 copy of whose
worts the editor wee told he might see either at St.
John's Cambridge, or at the College of Surgeons. Con-
trary to all probability, the bait took, the letter was inserted,
and the theory was adopted more greedily than ever
by the enlightened Protestant whose duty it is
to keep the taprooms from Popery. Repeated refs-
mock were made to it. It was brought up in all kinds of
ways. The British public were told the "the cram., which is
anweblem of what cannot be named inProtestant earn, is said
to be both an architectural ornament and an emblem of Chris-
tianity." They were assured that there is no difference be-
tween those who worship the statues of Semple and Isis and
those who perform tho same act to the emblem of that god
end goddess, united in the form of the Popish and Pueeyite
crow. They were asked to oppose theme who are "striving
to pollute the judges of the land in behalf of what is empha-
Really the very antipodes of Christianity." No wonder that
the contriver, or contrivers of the hoax became emboldened
by such unexpected su,cem. They determined to try their
luck again, and last Monday appeared a letter, signed "0.
Allan Saunders," which is too good not to be extracted ver-
batim :

rorEnY AND PROTESTANTISM.
"TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING ADVERTISER.

" Sir,—With reference to the identity of the symbols of the
Cross and the Phallus, an interesting subject to which
allusion has been more than once made in your columns,
allow me to add the following information, gleaned from a
mry ancient MS. discovered some year. since in a cellar be-
longing to the monastery of Apati, a Carthuaiim establish-
ment, the lazy and ignorant members of which were doubtless
unaware of the trenchant satire on their own superstition
lying hid among their bottles—somewhat remarkable, as the
cellar has more votaries there than the library, or had, in
the days when I knew the Levant.

"The MS. is now in the possession of my friend Signor
P. Montotnini, an authority of great weight in these matters,
now engaged one new edition of the Auctores Prispici: As
the contents of this curious MS. will be ditortmeed in an
elaborate note to this work, I will now merely state that it is
therein related that a certain monk, Amphelim by name,
who Seed at Edam% in the latter part of the fourth century,