George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) wanted the comparisons collected by earlier scholars to form a connected history. Reports from India, classical accounts of sacred rites, and biblical narratives should explain one another if their peoples shared the same earliest past. He read widely from his English study, using books to bring together places he had never visited. The Flood and the dispersal of humanity supplied the sequence into which the evidence could be placed.
His Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri (1803) examined ancient mystery cults, rites involving initiation and restricted religious teaching. He interpreted their divine figures and sacred vessels through Noah, the family of the ark, and the remembrance of catastrophe. In The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816), the account extended across a much wider field of religions. Worship of the heavenly bodies became entangled with memories of the Flood as peoples departed from their original knowledge.
The debt to Jacob Bryant (1715–1804) was acknowledged in a personal exchange. In the preface to the Cabiri, Faber printed Bryant’s response to a proposed disagreement about ancient mythology. Bryant explained that he had changed his own view and now substantially agreed with the younger writer. Their relationship involved revision and discussion as well as deference to an older authority.
Faber also developed the inherited comparisons for purposes of his own. His interest in prophecy joined the beginning of religious history to its expected end. Dispersal and corruption were followed by the prospect of gathering and restoration. The ancient evidence therefore belonged within an argument about events still to come.
That combination helps explain his importance to a reader in Vermont. Ethan Smith (1762–1849) acknowledged Faber when developing his own account of restoration, which identified Indigenous Americans with the lost tribes of Israel. Here the connection can be followed through a stated debt, rather than inferred from a resemblance alone. A reconstruction of the earliest religions had become part of an American minister’s expectations for the people living around him.