In commencing another volume of a series, and one to a great extent independent of the other two, it is advisable to pause and recapitulate the points advanced, and the positions attained. This is the more necessary when the present inquiry is a natural result of a preceding one, and when an attempt is made to collect and arrange the scattered materials into an harmonious and consistent edifice. Our volumes on the subject of "Ancient Faiths in Ancient Names" were, to a great extent, destructive. They struck heavy blows in all directions, wherever a false idol was to be recognized, and they destroyed many a cherished delusion, which was to many as dear as the apple of their eye. But, throughout the whole process of destruction, the idea of the necessity for a reconstruction was present to the mind of the author.

It may, indeed, be propounded as an interesting question, whether any iconoclast ever destroys the idols which his fellow-beings cherish, without entertaining the belief that he has something superior to offer in their place. When the fanatic Spaniards upset, fractured, and ground to powder the stone monsters venerated by the Mexicans, they offered to the natives the image of a lovely virgin and her gentle son to replace them; and when the enthusiastic Scotchmen destroyed the marble saints and gaudy figures of the Popish churches throughout their own country, they eagerly set forth the superiority of adoring the invisible creator in spirit and imagination, which afforded scope for the most entrancing mental delineations, and was far superior to reverencing an ugly effigy, which no one with any correct taste could admire. In like manner, when the Mahometan Caliph destroyed the library of Alexandria, he offered to the mourners in its place the book of the Prophet Mahomet, which was, in his eyes, a pearl of so great price as to be equivalent in value to all the world besides.

There can be no doubt, however, that the process of destruction is far more easy than the task of reconstruction. The engineer who is called upon to remove a bridge, on account of the badness of its foundation, may admire the extraordinary firmness with which every stone has been dovetailed together, and, with the means at his command, may be unable to construct another having a similar appearance of stability; yet, after all, an arch which is secure and stable is preferable to one which is good only in appearance. A very few years have elapsed since it was found that the tower and spire of the Cathedral at Chichester had been so built that there was imminent danger of the whole falling down. This part of the edifice resembled certain faiths which have been raised with great art to a vast height, with very slender and inadequate material. So long as they were not assailed by any storm, or tested by the changes which time produces, they seemed firm and unshakable; but, when they were really tried, they began to undergo a process similar to that which obtained in the Cathedral named—the admirers of the edifice attempted to prop up the failing tower; with iron and timber they shored up its bulging sides; they erected strong scaffolds to ease the mighty strain upon the crumbling walls; but all in vain—the lovely spire, built upon a foundation as rotten as the Mormon faith, came tumbling down, and the tall emblem pointing to the sky returned once more to earth. Before there could be any reconstruction attempted, it was necessary to procure all the material necessary; and when, with great labour, this was accumulated, a fresh erection was made, which was far stronger than the first, for every stone was duly examined, and solid masonry replaced the ancient rubble. So it has been with many a faith. Christianity has replaced the crumbling Judaism which existed at the beginning of our era, and the Reformed Church has since then, in many countries, replaced the gigantic sham of Popery. But the metaphor is one which we cannot wholly adopt, inasmuch as we believe that no faith of ancient times has ever wholly fallen like the spire and tower of Chichester, nor has any new system of belief the solidity of that new edifice which has replaced the old.

The difficulties connected with reconstruction are greatly increased by the propensity which is so common in the human mind to make the best of that which is in actual existence and familiar to the vulgar, rather than to adopt something entirely new. The child who dislikes to go to bed at night equally dislikes to get up in the morning, and we have known elderly people who have systematically preferred an old lumbering stage-coach to a first-class compartment in a railway carriage. In every walk of life an innovator is regarded as an enemy by the majority, and especially by those whose practice or whose theories his discoveries supersede.

Yet, great as is the contest which any new truth has to sustain, there is no doubt whatever that the first part of the fight—the preliminaries essential to conquest, are the investigation of the ground to be occupied; the real value of the defences; the superiority of the armour; and the temper, strength, and tenacity of the offensive weapons. The engineer to whom is confided the attack or the defence of a town will abandon or destroy everything which would harbour an enemy or facilitate his operations. The fighting commodore, ere he carries his ship into action, sacrifices readily all the gewgaws of luxury; and in like manner the ecclesiastic ought never to endanger his position by spending his energies in the defence of a useless outwork or a tinsel ornament. Entertaining these views ourselves, our first effort has been to clear the ground, and to remove every object which we consider to be detrimental to the spread of truth.

We have demonstrated, as far as such a matter is capable of demonstration, that the Old Testament, which has descended to us from the Jews, is not the mine of truth which it has been supposed by so many to be: that not only it is not a revelation given by God to man, but that it is founded upon ideas of the Almighty which are contradicted by the whole of animate and inanimate nature. We showed, that its composition was wholly of human origin, and that its authors had a very mean and degrading notion of the Lord of Heaven and Earth. We proved, what indeed Colenso and a host of German critics have demonstrated in another fashion, that its historical portions are not to be depended upon; that its stories are of no more real value than so many fairy tales or national legends; that its myths can now be readily traced to Grecian, Babylonian, and Persian sources; that its miracles are as apocryphal as those told of Vishnu, Siva, and other deities; and its prophecies absolutely worthless. We proved, moreover, that the remote antiquity of its authorship has been greatly exaggerated; that the stories of the creation, of the flood, of Abraham, of Jacob, of the descent into, and the exodus from, Egypt, of the career of Moses and the Jews in the desert, of Joshua and his soldiers, of the judges and their clients, are all apocryphal, and were fabricated at a late period of Jewish history, with the design of inspiriting the Hebrews at a period when their depression of spirit from foreign conquest was extreme; that the so-called Mosaic laws were not known until long after the time of David, and that some of the enactments—that about the Jubilee, for example—were never promulgated at all. We showed that the Jewish conception of the Almighty, and of His heavenly host, did not materially differ from the Greek idea of Jupiter and his inferior deities; that the Hebrews regarded Jehovah as having human passions and very human failings—as loving, revengeful, stern, merry, and vacillating—as "everything by turns and nothing long"—as forming a resolution, and then contriving how He might, as it were, overreach Himself. We pointed out that the Jews did, in reality, paint God and the Devil or Satan, as the same individual, being the former to His friends, and the latter to His enemies. Indeed, anyone who compares 2 Sam. xxiv. 1 with 1 Chron. xxi. 1 will see this most clearly demonstrated. We called attention to the apparently utter ignorance of the Jews that certain laws of nature existed, and of their consequent belief that defeat, disease, famine, slaughter, pestilence, and the like, were direct punishments of ceremonial or other guilt; while victory, wealth, virility, and old age were special and decided proofs of the Divine favour. We showed that the Jews were, in general, an abject but a very boastful race, and that their spiritual guides—the so-called prophets—were constantly promising, but always vainly, a striking manifestation of the Almighty's power in favour of the Hebrews when they were in the depths of misery, that histories were fabricated to give colour to these statements, and that these, like modern miracles of saints, were narrated as occurring a long time ago, and in a locality which could not be visited, e.g., in Samaria and Egypt; we showed, moreover, that the race was imitative, and readily adopted the religious ideas and practices of those who conquered them. Still further, we proved that the Jews had no idea whatever of a future state, and were in utter ignorance of heaven or hell; that they regarded the Almighty as punishing crime or rewarding goodness in this world alone, and, consequently, we inferred either—(1) that the conversation said to have been held between Jehovah and certain apocryphal men did not really occur; or (2) that God did not think the existence of a future world a matter of sufficient consequence to communicate to His friends; or (3) that Elohim had not then created either a habitation for the blessed, or a future prison-house for the damned; and we pointed out that the opinions of the Pharisees about angels, spirits, and futurity were not based upon the writings of Moses and the prophets, but upon Persian fantasies. In fine, we showed, that the Hebrews could not sustain the claim they made to be the especial people of God, and that their writings are of no more value, as records of absolute truth, or of Divine revelation, than the books of the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Hindoos, Chinese, or the more modern Mahometans.

With all this we indicated that there was, throughout the nations known as Shemitic, a general belief in the existence of an Almighty Being, Creator, Director and Governor of the heaven, the earth, and the sea; that He was considered to be One, yet that He was, nevertheless, represented by a multiplicity of names, and as having many and opposite attributes.

We also showed, that this sublime conception was very thickly coated with human ideas, often of a debased and grovelling type, and darkened by legends, which were invented by priests with the design of clothing themselves, and those of their order, with a portion of the garments which they had assigned to the Inscrutable. We showed, how the sun and moon, the stars and planets, became interwoven with the idea of a Celestial Being, and how they were described in turn as His ministers, His residence, His army, and sometimes even as Himself. We showed, moreover, that the Almighty was depicted by some as a male, having the attributes and passions of men, by others as a female, or celestial goddess, and by others as androgyne—not exactly a bifrons, like Janus, but masculine and feminine, Elohim, Baalim, Ashtaroth; that in the development of this idea, everything which has reference to the phenomena of mundane creation was closely studied, and introduced into one religious system or another. As a result of this, it followed, that there were some sects and temples consecrated to the adoration of the Creator as masculine, others as feminine, and others as both combined. We showed still farther, that each sect adopted certain emblems, which were intended to represent the distinctive mark of the sex under which it worshipped the Omnipotent, and that the emblems became multiplied as different nations came into contact with each other, learned foreign theology, and advanced in their knowledge of natural history. To such an extent was this symbolism, to which we refer, carried, that the sexual idea of the Creator at last pervaded, to a greater or less degree, all forms of worship, and gradually degraded them deeper and deeper, in consequence of the emblems of the deity being mistaken for the deity itself, much in the same way as the vulgar, amongst the Roman Catholics, regard a statuette or picture of the Virgin, or an Ashantee a particular form of idol fetish. As an example of such development, we pointed out that the Assyrians represented the Godhead as four-fold, consisting of the triple male and the single female element in mundane creation, and that the idea of the trinity in unity, which is a doctrine recognized as far back amongst all nations as history will carry us, was originally founded solely upon the well-known fact that the characteristic of the male is a triad, of which all the parts are really, and in no mysterious manner, "co-eternal together and co-equal." We also showed that the feminine idea of the Creator has, from time immemorial, been associated, in one form or another, with that of a lovely virgin holding a child in her arms, which is generally very young, and mostly receiving food from a maternal bosom, the reason of which we hinted at.

We showed that the myths of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarai, Esau and Jacob, were incorporations of the idea that the trinity and the unity, or, to use the very words of the Athanasian creed, "the trinity in unity," were the founders of the race of living beings, and, as such, worthy of worship and honour throughout all ages. This union was spoken of as "the four," and was symbolized as a square or a cross of four points, or a cross of eight points. We showed, still farther, that the male Creator was identified with the sun, and the female with the crescent moon, and also with the earth; and that one of the symbols of this celestial union of the sexes was the sun lying within the moon's crescent.

We also demonstrated, that a very large part of Pagan worship consisted in the performance of rites and ceremonies, whose end was the glorification of the deity under one or other of the selected symbols, and that a number of feasts were appointed to be held at certain astronomical periods, in which the assistants were encouraged to indulge in every form of sensuality (Deut. xiv. 26). We pointed out, that the Jewish people were largely tainted by this vicious form of worship prior to the Babylonian captivity, and that a very large portion of their nomenclature was based upon sexual ideas of the Creator. We also showed, that the Jewish writings encouraged certain forms of sensuality in a conspicuous manner; that the condition of the male organ was represented as being of such importance as to be the ground work of the covenant between God and the Hebrews, it being declared (Gen. xvii. 14), as if by the word of the Lord, that no man was to be allowed to live whose organ had not been improved in a definite manner, i.e., by circumcision or excision of the prepuce, and that no man was to be admitted into the congregation of the faithful whose characteristic male organs had in any way been injured or removed. Deuteronomy xxiii. 1 is conclusive upon this point, and there is no ambiguity in the words of the decree. We pointed out, also, that not only was abundance of offspring promised to the faithful as a proof of God's regard to them, but that the laws, said to be delivered by Jehovah to Moses, positively provided (see Deut. xxi. 10-14) the means by which the harems of the wealthy could be stocked in times of war, and by which even the poor might also be indulged, in or about the precincts of the temple, where slave and foreign women were kept for the purpose (Numb. xxxi. 40). We pointed out that the natural result of this licensed debauchery was a great increase in the population, which was so much in excess of the capacity of the land to sustain them, that it was necessary to check the number of adult mouths by conniving at infanticide, as was done in Rajpootana up to a recent period, and is said to be done in China now. It is clear, from the denunciations by the prophets of the vileness of the Jews of Jerusalem, and the impotent laws which were introduced into the so-called Mosaic code, that the Hebrew family was to the full as bad and vile as were the nations around them.

We further showed that there was a marked difference in the thoughts, the doctrines, the laws, the knowledge, the writings, and the form of worship amongst the Jews after they had come into contact with the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks; and we adverted to the fact that the laws of the Persians, and those of him, whom we would designate "the fictitious Moses," were remarkably similar; and we showed that everything in the Old Testament, which is, by the majority of Christians, deemed to be of Divine origin, had been derived from or through one or other of the sources which we have named, and which we call Pagan. From this we deduced the important corollary, either that the so-called revelation of the Old Testament is a sham, a priestly fabrication, and what is known as "a pious fraud," or that it was not made originally to the Hebrews. In neither case can the Jews establish a title to be the "chosen people of God" in any sense of the words. If the Bible is true, the Gentiles have spiritual precedence over the Hebrews, and the Pagans have the pas of the Christians.

This deduction enabled us to recognize the importance of an extended inquiry into the faith, religion, and practice of other nations, before we assume ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the claims which one human being, or any body of men, might make to be the representatives of the Almighty, the sole recipients of His commands, and the only medium by which prayers can be forwarded to Him. Again, the history of the past, and a study of the present, enabled us to see that the foundation of a new religion, or the modification of an old one, did not destroy ancient practices, though it transferred priestly power to a new set of men, who, while they introduced new gods and new dogmas, endeavoured to incorporate the older ideas with new, so as to seduce or cheat the vulgar, whom it was not judicious to slaughter, into adopting the new faith. Consequently, we are able to understand how indecent ideas, sexual emblems, and Pagan festivals, with many of the licentious practices associated therewith, have been handed down from a remote idolatry to a modern and comparatively enlightened Christianity. The symbols of the objectionable still remain, but the things symbolized have been altered, and the original ideas suppressed. The male triad is a holy trinity; the monad is no longer the emblem of womankind, but of the so-called Mother of God, or, as the Romanists say, of the Mater Creatoris. But with this knowledge comes the very important consideration, how far Christian ideas, which are founded upon Pagan fancies, can be regarded as Divine. This, again, involves the question, how far Jesus, who had not penetration enough to discover the true nature of the writings to which he trusted, can be considered as an incarnation of Divine knowledge, or of unbounded wisdom. Still further, it became clear, after our arguments, that if the stories of the creation of man, the fall of Adam, the life of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses, the tale of Sinai, and the supremacy of Judah, are mythical—if the prophetic writings are as worthless as the oracles of Dodona and of Delphi—then all theories, dogmas, and doctrines founded upon them must be equally valueless.

In pursuance of my subject, I pointed out that there was not a nation known to history which had not its god or gods, a sacred priesthood, a set of prophets, either located in one spot, or appearing as independent vaticinators, a number of holy festivals, of hallowed shrines, of mysterious temples, and an inner and recondite arcanum into which the profane were not permitted to enter. I showed that other nations besides the Jews had a sacred ark which was an emblem of a divinity; that the use of sacrifices was common to every nation of antiquity; and that such things had existed in Hindostan from time immemorial. I pointed out, that there was no single precept or order contained in the Jewish Ritual which could not be found amongst all other people, with the sole exception of the Sabbath; and that the respect for this very strange law was due to the ignorance of the Hebrews, who regarded Saturn as the most high amongst the gods—information gained from the Babylonians.

Thus, an investigation into the nature and importance of Ancient Faiths becomes a necessary prelude to, or, rather, is unavoidably followed by, an inquiry into the beliefs, doctrines, and practices current in Christendom generally, and in Great Britain particularly. Yet, though I was insensibly driven forwards to complete the task which I began, without having any definite notion of the amount of labour I should have to undergo, I passively resisted for a long time the conclusions to which I was drawn, feeling myself unwilling, almost, indeed, unable, to undertake an examination which might shake my faith in the New Testament as it had been shaken in the Old. Like many others of a thoughtful turn of mind, I could see, without very strong regret, the Jewish writings consigned to their appropriate niche in the library of the world; but I shunned the effort required to take down the books of the Gospels and Epistles and weigh them in the impartial balance of critical truth. Nevertheless, as my work on Ancient Faiths progressed, I became painfully conscious that I must plead guilty to the charge of mental cowardice if I shirked the duty of examining the New, as I had investigated the Old, Testament. But when the resolution to investigate modern faith was at length formed, the difficulties surrounding the subject became apparent. The history of modern faith is, to a great extent, the history of Christianity, and the history of Christianity must start from a history of Jesus and his apostles—Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude, as given in the Epistles and Gospels included in the canon of the New Testament. To cope with any one of these histories as they deserve to be handled would involve the work of a lifetime, and for one man to exhaust the whole seemed to me an impossibility. There was, in addition to this, another consideration which complicated my difficulty still farther, viz., the fact that there were already, written histories of the nature of those alluded to, and that it would be useless to multiply them. It is a thankless task to pursue the current of the Christian religion through the dark scenes which shrouded it, from the time when it was adopted by a few "unlearned and ignorant men," until it emerged as a power able to shake empires—from the period wherein its professors were burned and otherwise tortured to death, to the days when their own Christian successors racked, roasted, and tormented their opponents, with a malignancy and cruelty as great as that which they themselves had execrated when practised upon their predecessors. From the moment that Christianity became a political power, its history resembled that of any tyrant or other ruler, and it is filled with misrepresentation, lying, fraud, the records of fighting and slaughter, of brutal passions, frightful laws, and horrible punishments; in fact, the record of political Christianity is that of a Devil in sheep's clothing. Even Calvin, one of our cherished reformers, burnt another Protestant almost in the same year as the Papists burnt Ridley and Latimer. The English Episcopalians in Scotland, and the Cromwellian Puritans in Ireland, showed more of the ravening wolf in their actions than of the amiable shepherd, who "gently leads" the weak ones of his flock. In fact, the more loud the proclamation of a pure Christianity, the more devilish is the practice of its heralds.

When I turned to the consideration of the life of Jesus, it was clear that the ground was already fully occupied. In 1799 a Mr Houston published a work entitled Ecce Homo; or, a Critical Inquiry into the History of Jesus Christ: being an Analysis of the Gospels, a second edition of which was made public fourteen years afterwards, and, as a result, its publisher (D. J. Eaton) was prosecuted, and such of the impressions as could be collected were publicly burned in St. George's Fields, London, by the common hangman, whose business it was to strangle truth as well as murderers. This book, which is little known to modern readers, is strictly what it professes to be—a critical inquiry into the history of Jesus Christ, and it may, to a great extent, be considered as the progenitor of more modern treatises. It does not materially differ from the Ecce Homo of to-day, or from the other works which we shall name, except in its style and composition. Having been written when all were in the habit of expressing their views in strong language, and when opponents were abused in terms of coarse invective, the author has expressed himself in a manner calculated to offend rather than to convince, and to stir up anger rather than to encourage thought. Yet his arguments are unanswerable, and his deductions unimpeachable, by those who know the value of evidence and exercise their power of ratiocination. I have been unable to find that any work was written in refutation of the author's views, and the only opposition to it was from the usual agent of the weak-minded, but strong-bodied—persecution.

In more recent times, and within a very short period of each other—so short, indeed, that we may say that the books were composed simultaneously in Hindostan, Germany, France, and England—there have appeared A Voice from the Ganges, Strauss' New Life of Jesus, Kenan's Life of Jesus, The English Life of Jesus, by Mr Thomas Scott, of Norwood, a second Ecce Homo, from a modern Professor, and The Prophet of Nazareth, by Owen Meredith.* In these volumes, the historical value of the Gospel narratives closely and critically examined, and a just appreciation of the character, preaching, and practice of the Prophet of Nazareth are honestly sought after, and, in the opinion of impartial readers, they must be held to have been attained. Throughout the series which we have mentioned nothing that is capable of demonstration, or of approximate proof, is taken for granted. The scholarship of the critical philosopher everywhere overbears the prejudice of the Christian bigot. Since the appearance of these another author has treated upon the same subject, but only cursorily, and as bearing upon other matters, in a work entitled The Book of God; or, The Apocalypse of Adam Oannes, which was published anonymously, 1868.

Between the publication of the first Ecce Homo and the second, viz., in 1836, there was printed, for private circulation, a very remarkable work, entitled Anacalypsis; or, an Attempt to draw aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis, by Godfrey Higgins. His two volumes are replete with learning, and with deductions more startling than any which had appeared prior to his own time; but the subject matter is so badly arranged, that it is with very great difficulty that the trains of thought which occupied the author's mind can be dis-. covered. His main idea is, that very nearly everything in religion which appears to be mythical or mysterious enfolds certain astronomical facts—such as the precession of equinoxes, the duration of cycles of time—such as are necessary to reproduce exactly a concordance between certain terrestrial and celestial phenomena. With this theory he interweaves an amazing number of facts which seem to favour the opinion enunciated in the book of Ecclesiastes—i.e., that there is nothing new under the sun. He shows that the idea of "incarnations," the birth of a heavenly child from a pure virgin, and a variety of so-called Christian dogmas, have existed in every age of which we have historical accounts.

He gives a vivid sketch of the nature of Christianity and its progress from century to century, and he expresses himself respecting its modern developments much in the same strain, though in a far more gentlemanlike style, as did his contemporary, the Rev. R. Taylor, to whom was given, or who assumed for himself, the title of the Devil's chaplain.

In the estimation of some of these writers, Jesus, the son of Mary, is quite as mythical a being as Hercules, the son of Alcmena. This view has been more recently adopted by some freethinkers of the present day. The main support on which such individuals rely is the fact that there is no mention of Jesus by any contemporary historian; and that, although there are extant Jewish records of current history, at the time in which Christ is said to have lived, they make no mention of him who is now called the Saviour and of his wonderful history. It is pointed out that the histories of the Gospels came out with marvellous rapidity, from Alexandria, about the end of the first century, at a time when all contemporaries of Jesus were dead.

To this work of Higgins it is probable that we shall have repeatedly to refer, for his language is frequently so forcible that it cannot be improved, and, moreover, he very often quotes from books, copies of which I have been unable to obtain.

When I found that the ground which I intended to occupy had already been so well and so ably cultivated, it occurred to me that it would be advisable to take a wider flight than was originally contemplated, and, instead of examining the Christian faith alone, to associate with it an account of the faiths of those nations of whom we have some knowledge. By this means it appeared to me, that we should be enabled to see clearly, how far the current belief and practice of Christendom differs from the doctrines and practices of those to whom Christianity could never, by any possibility, have come, and we can examine, incidentally, into the teachings of Jesus, and compare them with that of his predecessor, Sakya Muni, or Buddha. We may also investigate impartially such doctrines as the immaculate conception, and the existence of angels.

When treating, however, a subject like the religions of the ancient and modern world, it is difficult to frame the history so as to bring out the salient points, in a manner satisfactory to the reader or to the writer. The latter is tempted to begin, as he believes, at the beginning, and to trace the development of religious thought from its simplest expression up to its highest aspiration. This temptation becomes all the stronger if, in the course of his study, he has investigated the animal and vegetable creations. In those vast kingdoms he sees that the philosopher is able to lead his disciples onwards from the minute monad, or the simplest mass of matter, to the gigantic mastodon, without any very conspicuous flaw or break in continuity; but, on closely observing his method of proceeding, the student finds that links which connect genera or species together are found in countries so wide apart, that no direct communication can be supposed between the one type and the other. Thus the gap between mammals and birds is said to be filled by the "ornithorhynchus paradoxus," an animal living in a vast island, in which scarcely one quadruped mammalian is known to have existed, and where the aboriginal birds form a class peculiar to Australia, and have no resemblance to the creature referred to.

Yet, though the temptation is great, and although we feel justified in reasoning from the known to the unknown, and in supplying missing links from analogy, or from our own imagination, still, we consider that it will be our best plan to confine ourselves, as far as possible, to that which is written, and to describe first, the religious ideas and practices of some so-called savages; secondly, the ideas and practices of some ancient races, whose histories, more or less perfect, have come down to us, with a view to ascertain whether there is anything essentially good in modern Christianity, either in faith or practice, which is peculiar to that form of religion, or whether almost the same style of teaching may not be found to have been common in the remote East, at a period some centuries prior to the birth of Jesus.

As we have investigated the subjects of Sin, Salvation, Prayer, Inspiration, &c., it is unnecessary to refer to them again.