(WILSON'S Parsi Religion) In Persia and Assyria the circle was represented sometimes on the breast, sometimes round the waist, and sometimes in the hand of the sun-divinity. (BRYANT and LAYARD'S Nineveh and Babylon) In India it is represented at the tip of the finger. (MOOR'S Pantheon, "Vishnu") Hence the circle became the emblem of Tammuz born again, or "the seed." The circular tonsure of Bacchus was doubtless intended to point him out as "Zero," or "the seed," the grand deliverer. And the circle of light around the head of the so-called pictures of Christ was evidently just a different form of the very same thing, and borrowed from the very same source. The ceremony of tonsure, says Maurice, referring to the practice of that ceremony in India, "was an old practice of the priests of Mithra, who in their tonsures imitated the solar disk." (Antiquities) As the sun-god was the great lamented god, and had his hair cut in a circular form, and the priests who lamented him had their hair cut in a similar manner, so in different countries those who lamented the dead and cut off their hair in honour of them, cut it in a circular form. There were traces of that in Greece, as appears from the Electra of Sophocles; and Herodotus particularly refers to it as practised among the Scythians when giving an account of a royal funeral among that people. "The body," says he, "is enclosed in wax. They then place it on a carriage, and remove it to another district, where the persons who receive it, like the Royal Scythians, cut off a part of their ear, shave their heads in a circular form," &c. (Hist.) Now, while the Pope, as the grand representative of the false Messiah, received the circular tonsure himself, so all his priests to identify them with the same system are required to submit to the same circular tonsure, to mark them in their measure and their own sphere as representatives of that same false Messiah. Now, if the priests of Rome take away the key of knowledge, and lock up the Bible from the people; if they are ordained to offer the Chaldean sacrifice in honour of the Pagan Queen of Heaven; if they are bound by the Chaldean law of celibacy, that plunges them in profligacy; if, in short, they are all marked at their consecration with the distinguishing mark of the priests of the Chaldean Bacchus, what right, what possible right, can they have to be called ministers of Christ?
But Rome has not only her ordinary secular clergy, as they are called; she has also, as every one knows, other religious orders of a different kind. She has innumerable armies of monks and nuns all engaged in her service.