Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/108

86 portion than it is in here, and that any people who could so boldly and admirably' design the length, general proportions, and attitude of the creature must have made the thick parts also wider, or could not so egregiously have failed in this. No facts would be more salient, and it would be the easiest measure to express; it is impossible these parts could, unless intentionally, have been made so thin, as they would certainly have about reached to the dotted line.

By the hypothesis the strange serpent of Schick now enables us to form, the anomalous fact of so preposterous a body, when the rest is so beautifully figured, is explained; it is a serpent as well as horse. (I have tried to be accurate in my figure, but it is not perfect.)

Now there is no doubt, though it is perhaps very little known, that the great White Horse is a sacred symbol—of Ceridwen, the type again of the Holy Spirit. The same hybrid conception is to be seen on Ancient British coins. Christ, again, has been set forth mystically, or His Spirit, in Scripture, in connection both with a white horse, a serpent, and a dove; and here all may, perhaps, be combined, as in figures of Osiris, &c., in Egypt, forms or ideas are, and as the strength, spirituality, and wisdom of the Deity were in the majestic, human-headed, winged bulls which stood on each side the entrance of the Palace of Nineveh, in the advanced civilisation of the earliest times.

Hence, we may actually still say, with Baron UstinofF, that the centauric serpents were, perhaps, copies of Moses' brazen one made and exhibited indubitably as a type of Christ! And, in such a possibility—now credible, how interesting to conceive of that symbol as actually thus mystical and compound! Yet, certainly, there is much reason to think these found in Canaan were no other; and it is worthy of note how, while the "Brazen Serpent" had to be destroyed because it was worshipped or made a charm of, these copper ones must have been very abundant—i.e., would seem to have been exactly so used.

Indeed it might well be that, troubled and angered to lose their Nehushtan, the people who had grown attached to symbols made these copies of it at once abundantly so as to continue to worship the sign, of which still six have been found.

To recur, lastly, to the former subject, it is of much interest here to notice how the Serpent was designed as passing through the Circle of the Druids, as may still be seen, or both were found together—as we seem now again to have found them in the last report of Baurath von Schick. Tin's figure came to be worshipped, even by a sect of Christians, doubtless because of its reference to Christ; and He was expressed by it because He came and took sin's curse—which had come in by the serpent. So, too, He bade His followers to be " wise as serpents," but with His or the