CHAPTER II.

RIVERS OF LIFE OR FAITHS OF MAN IN ALL LANDS.

A very remarkable Chart, intended to describe the progress of religious ideas and varying forms of worship among all nations, was long ago issued by Major General Forlong, by means of which he traced out with considerable clearness what he believed to be the stream of human religious progress from as far back as 10,000 B. C. The earliest forms of worship included the Tree and the Serpent as objects of world-wide veneration, and with these emblems were associated all the symbols connected with Phallic worship. It is quite easy to trace in these primitive and wide-spread emblems the natural tendency of humanity to deify all those agencies through which the stream of life is constantly flowing from some mysterious unseen fountain-head into manifold manifest exterior expressions. According to Forlong’s calculations the worship of Fire somewhat preceded the adoration of the sun, and these two forms of closely related worship he traces back to about 6,000 B. C. Regarding the chart carefully we soon become familiar with many interblending lines showing how Sun worship, Tree worship and Serpent worship were so interblended as to have been well-nigh, if not entirely, inseparable. Ancestor worship, according to this reckoning, dates back only to about 3,500 B. C, and seems to have immediately followed the more ancient Egyptian Sacred Ritual which paid special homage to all phases of creative fertility. Mountain worship is still more recent and is said to have prevailed everywhere at the time assigned by Jewish tradition to the giving of the Law from Sinai, and immediately after that period Animal worship became everywhere prevalent. This seems to be in strict accord with the narrative in Exodus which informs us that the people worshiped the golden calf after the Law had been revealed to them from the mountain top, and we may also well believe that the sacredness of mountains appealed especially to men of prophetic type, while animal worship was the common practice of the unenlightened. We can never entirely get away from these forms of worship which grow up instinctively and are there-fore no more artificial products than are any other spontaneous natural productions. We have all some instinct of veneration within us which in its earlier and less refined condition is sure to lead us to pay extravagant homage to those external objects which most naturally and powerfully seize hold upon our imagination and cause us, by their unique impressiveness, to regard them as divine agents in more than ordinary degree.

This consideration alone may lead us far on the highly desirable road of kindly consideration for the many aspects of faith and forms of worship which have survived unto this day, and which seemingly satisfy, in some considerable measure, the religious aspirations of multitudes of our contemporaries. Though the very highest idea of Deity which the human mind seems capable of entertaining is well expressed in the majestic words “God is Spirit and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth,” what constitutes spirit, and how spiritual worship may be offered, is not usually very clear to the average intellect, hence men have always devised some concrete figures which they have placed before them, not intending thereby to represent Deity in fullness, but only to assist them in concentrating their attention upon some venerated object which to their minds clothes or embodies at least some special divine attribute which they most admire and which they most desire to share. Modern scholarship universally inclines to an acceptance of the thoroughly reasonable proposition that beyond all localized and limited divinities the great nations of antiquity acknowledged and venerated one Supreme Being whose attributes were variously embodied in multitudes of subordinate divinities, and though it is the proud boast of the most advanced nations in the modern world that they acknowledge only one God as the proper object of human worship, we can hardly fail to recognize a very definite continuation of ancient Paganism in modern Christianity. By this declaration we are not intending to infer anything disrespectful to the Christian system, though we cannot admit that in its present form it is other than hybrid. Primitive Christianity may have originated with some definite determination on the part of a few intensely zealous men and women to carry into effect the exact teachings of a great Master whom they desired implicitly to follow, but no student of Christian history can fail to note that very soon indeed the early Church began to associate itself with the civil power of the Roman Empire, and from the moment it did so it must have ceased to preserve, even in semblance, its primitive simplicity. All the great religions of the world appear to have originated with some great inspiration received through some illustrious Founder, whose followers very soon began to drift away from the primal purity of the system established by the Founder, and in so doing they invariably committed themselves to an endorsement of prevailing ideas and customs, which had already taken so firm a hold upon the minds of the great bulk of the populace where the new religion was introduced, that a formulated system soon grew up and flourished which was a compromise between the new revelation and the older hierarchy. We can readily see traces of this blending of new and old in every Bible we may be called upon to study, and the fact of its universality should dispose us to take a kindly as well as a rational view alike of its origin and purpose. Though worship of external objects, no matter how majestic and sublime, must be ultimately superseded by a purely spiritual form of adoration, we can clearly see that in the course of human conscious evolution lower concepts of Deity must of necessity precede higher ones, and for this reason we should be ever ready to put the most favorable construction possible upon ancient and modern religious beliefs and usages alike. It is a great, though a very common, error to suppose that so eminently rational and charitable a view means indifference to all essentials of faith or doctrine, for such is surely not the case. The most thoroughly sympathetic view of all religious systems is the one always taken by the most thoroughly devout and conscientious upholders of those essential and fundamental verities, which an impartial investigation of Comparative Religion can only serve to endear more and more to the hearts and minds of all who are liberal and intelligent enough to appreciate, in some vital manner, the splendid words attributed to the Apostle Paul, “GOD has never left Himself without witness.” As we trace the widely spreading boughs of Forlong's imaginary tree, and seek to appreciate the manifest significance of its widely ramifying branches, we cannot fail to note how many strange beliefs and practices are often marvellously interlinked. Human progress in civilization seems always to have proceeded along a circuitous path; never does it seem to have gone straight forward. This fact must be well digested before we can possibly estimate truly the career of religious ideas and ceremonies through centuries and milleniums. It has long been a gross mistake, and a fatal error, to suppose that one religious system has necessarily borrowed from another because we can trace extremely close resemblances in many instances between one system and another. This close relationship both in doctrine and ceremonial by no means necessarily proves anything more or other than that different peoples in different countries may have simultaneously reached an almost identical altitude of mental, moral, and spiritual attainment. It is clearly evident that between five and six centuries prior to the commencement of the Christian Dispensation a mighty spiritual, intellectual and moral wave of inspiration and illumination was sweeping voluminously over the Earth, laving Europe, Asia, and the Northern Coast of Africa with its effulgence. Then were the days of the latest of the Buddhas in India, of Confucius, the eminent moral philosopher, and of Laotze, the profound Mystic, in China; also of the greatest of the Philosophers in Greece. How came it about, we may well enquire, that so many illustrious lights were shining contemporaneously in different sections of the world? Surely there are mental, moral, and spiritual tides in the history of Humanity which have their periodic ebb and flow as surely as have the tides of oceans, which most of us have learned to trace. To ascertain the cause and periodicity of these mysterious Psychic Tidal Waves may yet be well within our average power, but up to the present the ability to do this has been claimed as an exclusive possession of certain highly trained or well developed Adepts or Initiates, who can peer within the veil of mystery which has for ages shrouded the inner sanctuaries from the gaze of all the uninitiated. A mighty question is now agitating the minds of rapidly increasing multitudes, viz., Has the time now come for the great unveiling long predicted, and eagerly anticipated by enquiring throngs to-day? The signs are manifold, and they are rapidly accumulating, that we are on the immediate verge of a new Cycle in human history.

To quote the language of Forlong, “There may be observed from the synchronizing of the history of faiths a remarkable tidal wave of intensity which seems to acutely affect the race physically and mentally and with remarkable regularity every six hundred to six hundred and fifty years, reminding us of the Sothic and other cycles, but especially of the mystical phœnix or Solar eras of Egypt and the East. The ebb and flow of this tide is shown on the chart by light broad bands embracing a width of one hundred years.”

With the beginning of the Christian era we notice a determined effort to unify, as far as possible, every system older than Christianity. This tendency is so familiar to all students of the Fathers of the early Church, that it seems almost incredible that any graduate from a well equipped divinity college can be ignorant of the fact that what he has been taught to call Christianity is both a compound and a continuation of many ancient faiths and ceremonies; but though this is unmistakably the case we are not thereby justified in characterizing Christianity or the New Testament as in any sense fraudulent, though that serious charge is often brought by vigorous iconoclasts, who can readily trace existing parallels but seem unable to interpret their real significance. The publishers of Forlong’s chart were very careful to publish in connection with it the thoroughly truthful statement that it is neither orthodox or heterodox but simply chronological, therefore suitable for general use in all schools where classics are taught; but though it is simply historical in its manifest design, no one who peruses it thoughtfully can fail to trace its distinctly universal implications. Its chief object is professedly to exhibit a gradual evolution of ideas from rude material and elemental symbolism to abstract spiritual conceptions. Several colors are employed, each one denoting some great leading idea which, though long continuing, tends to diverge and at length become lost in some wider common stream. The streams are called merely “Lines of Thought,” neither national nor ethnographical in their arrangement, for certain streams of tendency are steadfast while all religious systems are progressive, in consequence of the fact that human nature progresses and one generation of men and women will inevitably put some new construction upon doctrines and ceremonies alike, by no means in strict accordance with the views taken by their predecessors in the same communion.

We are altogether too much inclined to speak of people as Jews, Christians, or Mohammedans, as though such broad designations completely describe as well as effectively label them; but such a mistaken inference can never hold sway over the minds of soberly thoughtful people, seeing that nothing can be more self evident than that there are as many varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedism, for example, as there are distinctive types of people professing each of these varied systems of religious thought and practice.

We are often apt to think that should we travel in Eastern Asia and mingle freely with Brahmins, Buddhists and Parsees, we should find certain rigid kinds of people professing certain definite doctrines and observing certain ancient and unvarying ceremonies with scarcely anything to distinguish one individual from another among professors of a certain creed. This might prove true, to some extent at least, were we to associate exclusively with the uneducated and largely unthinking rank and file of some specific population, but should we enlarge the scope of our acquaintance, till it included the best educated and most highly representative members of any Oriental community, we should soon discover quite as wide a dissimilarity of thought and practice as we are ever likely to encounter in the West. That fertile author, James Freeman Clarke, whose splendid text book, “Ten Great Religions,” is a most valuable mine of rich historical information, often took occasion to remind his hearers, in the course of his always instructive sermons, that we greatly need to remember that though institutions seemingly remain permanent, with their confessions of faith unchanged and their ceremony unaltered, yet because the living members of those institutions are not the men and women of past centuries, we have no right or reason to expect that the personal conduct of any body of people to-day will necessarily be identical with the behavior of the men and women who bore the same distinctive titles in the past. This is, of course, self-evidently true, but as every organization extant to-day contains many widely diversified elements, so was it in even the distant past; consequently the more thoroughly we study history the more clearly convinced do we become that there never was a time when all the professors of a distinctive creed came up to a uniform standard of either intellectuality or morality.

Quite recently the beatification of Jeanne D'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, by the Church of Rome has called much attention to two distinctly separate aspects of the attitude of that Church to the heroic girl who was indeed a deliverer of France, and then a Martyr through the perfidy of the very King and his attendants who owed their exaltation and their safety to the brave inspired damsel without whose valiant leadership the French Army of that period could never have been victorious.

We often hear it said that the Church burnt this maiden as a witch a few hundred years ago and now enthrones her statue above its altars as an object of veneration for the faithful, while priests call upon their people to invoke the intercession of the very girl who was so bitterly denounced and cruelly massacred in a by-gone century. This statement is by no means altogether true, for while it may be a historic fact that those particular persons who put the maiden to death professed the Roman Catholic faith, we cannot learn from any reliable historian that the high dignitaries of the Church as a whole were in any way concerned with her unjust martyrdom. Personal jealousy and other equally base motives animating the corrupt minds of certain men in authority at the time of her condemnation, were the direct external causes of the unjust sentence passed upon her; it is not therefore true to relate that a great Church as a whole condemned the Maid of Orleans in one century and canonized her in another, but it is a fact that the general temper of these times is less barbaric than that of four or five hundred years ago. Yet even now it does not seem impossible that harsh injustice might be meted out to some modern deliverer of France, or any other land, were corrupt men to be in power and in a position to cast a deciding vote as to the fate of a new emancipator.

We can all understand what Felix Adler, President of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, meant when he gave a book the title of “Deed vs. Creed,” though that saying cannot always be endorsed at its full face value. What Dr. Adler clearly intended to convey was that good deeds can be performed regardless of creed, and any sort of creed can be intellectually maintained regardless of the behavior of its advocates. We sometimes hear it said that it is of no consequence what we believe provided we live good lives; this is a very shrewd saying requiring very close examination, by reason of the fact that it seems to contain a sort of catch which, however, we soon discover when we penetrate below the surface of its obvious letter. Much good was undoubtedly done some years ago through the columns of the London Daily Telegraph by the publication day after day, for several months, of numerous letters from all conceivable varieties of scribes in answer to the query, Do we Believe? “Of course we all believe something,” is the only possible general answer which can be given to this question, but two other inquiries directly follow it, What do we Believe? and, Why do we Believe what we Believe? to which a third may be added, What Influence does our Belief exert over our Conduct? To answer these four queries, not merely to discuss the first in the series, must be the work of the philosophic student, and it will surely not take us very long to make the uncomplimentary discovery that our average beliefs are largely due to nothing else than blind unreasoning compliance with accepted notions entertained by a large majority of persons among whom we have been brought up. Such beliefs cannot well be vital; they are usually little if any better than intellectual lumber, a kind of mental furniture which we take for granted because we have been accustomed to seeing it in our surroundings from our early childhood. Once we begin to think seriously upon the nature and import of belief, we find that our beliefs, if they are in any sense living, cannot be entirely unimportant, because they always do exercise a considerable amount of influence upon our actual life. We cannot really believe in an angry God or in useless and endless misery without being to some extent demoralized thereby; such beliefs, therefore, are decidedly dangerous in their inevitable tendency, because if they are seriously entertained, or even passively accepted, their necessary tendency is to brutalize instead of humanize those who hold them. When, on the other hand, we really believe in a God of love and wisdom, who is in essence entirely beneficent, also in the remedial nature of all chastisement involving suffering both here and hereafter, such a conception must have a tendency to ennoble and purify our own attitude toward our fellow beings. In all our arguments in favor of simple Theism as immeasurably superior to every narrower and cruder faith, we base our claim for its reasonableness and goodness, not upon any metaphysical subtlety, but upon the appeal it makes to all the sweetest and noblest sentiments in our common human nature. People must be dense indeed if they cannot see that a higher idea of divine government, extending throughout the universe, must exert a better influence upon humanity at large than can any lower concept.

Tracing, as far as we are able, the career of the God idea in history, we do not find so much of widely separated streams of thought as we trace a blended current, due to the fact that the greatest teachers of humanity have appeared and worked among all conditions of human development.

To go no further back than the period referred to in the Christian Gospels we are told that a great spiritual luminary blazes forth in the Roman Empire, of which Judea is then a province. This spiritual light shines freely for all and is poetically designated “the Sun of Righteousness arisen with healing in its wings,” a prophetic metaphor which clearly gives evidence that the disciples of a great Master believed his mission to be entirely universal in its intent. So it consistently follows that evangelists record that this great teacher commissions his emissaries to go forth as ambassadors into all nations proclaiming good news, or joyful tidings, to every creature. But how do the same evangelists tell us that this Master and his teachings were received? Multitudes at times flocked to his standard and crowds of common people heard him gladly, but there were also many who regarded him as a sorcerer, or as an imposter, and stirred up a conspiracy against him, even as certain vicious elements in Greek society at an earlier day had branded Socrates a foe to religion and virtue and an enemy of the State worthy only of banishment or death. We may well believe that some people both in Greece and in Palestine were actually sincere in their benighted protests against the life and teachings of the great teachers whom they hounded out of physical existence, but in all probability the great majority of those who joined in the clamor for the removal of those who were continually doing good were actuated by far from honorable motives, foremost among which was the constant fear that their own temporal power, which they knew they held unjustly, would soon be wrested from their grasp did they allow a high moral philosophy to win increasing triumphs in lands which they desired unrighteously to govern. But be this as it may, it is not possible that a low type of intellect can ever grasp a very high idea of either divine or human government; thus it often happens that quite sincere, but undeveloped, natures believe that harsh coercive measures are essential to the welfare of the Family and of the State, therefore, from their standpoint, those who teach the Law of Love and adopt a higher policy than that of warfare are looked upon as dangerous fanatics who, if their influence should greatly spread, would quickly undermine and overthrow the safeguards of society. Those who entertain such views, and we have some such human fossils in our midst to-day, cannot see anything but a dangerous menace to morality in the breaking up of the old traditions to which they slavishly adhere, fearing that if these be even weakened a deluge of vice and anarchy will speedily overwhelm the earth. Many preachers who represent the extreme of surviving religious orthodoxy express not the slightest hesitancy in declaring that apart from some element of dogmatic theological teaching interfused, all advance in secular education must eventually result in weakening instead of strengthening the ramparts of morality.

This contention, though ultimately unsound, commends itself with easy readiness to the minds of timid and highly emotional people who have never sought to soberly sift the groundworks of morality. Dogmatic theology has long been so closely associated with moral training in the minds of large rural populations in many countries that it must be difficult for many parents, who belong to an old regime, to understand the attitude of the Ethical Culturists of the present day, and some show of reasonableness attaches to their fears because of the fact that during a transition period like the present, when an impulsive rising generation breaks away from time-honored moorings it is very likely to plunge unthinkingly into an abyss of folly from which it can only be recovered through the agency of a wiser mode of treatment than is yet widely comprehended by the masses. It is, however, only fair to state that the present generation is guilty of no crimes or follies which were not often perpetrated in the so-called “good old days” when the parson was supreme in the village, the Bible regularly read, and family prayer punctually offered. There are evidently two causes for modern religious and social unrest; one is unmistakably due to the spirit of the age, which no attempt to quench can prove successful; the other proceeds from a certain careless impetuosity, begotten of that very restraint which so many short-sighted persons believe to be the only safeguard of youth and upholder of morality. Take us as a whole we are undoubtedly deeper and more serious thinkers than were our forefathers, though we may not have among us any very large number of particularly eminent men and women; but this seeming absence of distinguished geniuses may be fairly attributed to the causes which Bulwer Lytton in his famous novel, “The Coming Race,” says the Vril-Ya gave for the absence of distinguished genius in that mysterious subterranean world into which that highly romantic author has introduced his often awestruck readers. Where the general average of intelligence is high we cannot reasonably expect that lofty mental attainments will stand out so conspicuously as where it is comparatively low; likewise where the general moral attitude is fairly lofty we seldom pause to contemplate with great esteem some distinguished moral hero; and again we must not lose sight of the fact that true and lasting morality can never be secured where individuality is suppressed and the people cowed into submission by threats of terrific punishment if they dare to disobey the mandates of their commanding officers. We are certainly nearer to the long predicted Golden Age than we have ever been before.

But what is really meant by this romantic figure of speech? we may well enquire. An age in which literal gold is worshiped, as though it were veritable Deity, must ever be an age of dire calamity, and such it has ever proved whenever and wherever this popular idol has been enthroned for adoration. Gold in the Alchemical sense means something far different indeed from any precious material metal, though it can scarcely be seriously disputed among students of Alchemistic Philosophy that all its chief exponents have admitted the possibility of the literal transmutation of baser into superior metals, and all eventually into gold. The symbolic mention of gold, however, directs our thoughts far away from all external treasures and centers them upon a celestial inheritance, in comparison with which all worldly possessions must sink into utter insignificance; therefore we are perpetually assured by Mystics of every rank and name, that the true object of Alchemical research is the regeneration of individual human beings immediately, and ultimately of the entire Human Race. “I believe in the resurrection of the Body and in the Life Everlasting,” originally meant far more than it means to the average Creed-reciter of to-day, who is usually one who scarcely seeks to find any interior meaning in the mighty mystic words which rise so glibly to the lips of all who have simply learned to utter published phrases. In like manner Baptismal Regeneration is taken only as to its most external garb, when in reality it has true reference to that marvel of interior transformation which it has always been the object of the Mysteries to progressively unveil. The first body to be considered when we are dealing with Mystic Initiation is, of course, the inner body of the Neophyte or Candidate, one who is sometimes termed a Catechumen; but as no selfish desire for exclusive individual salvation or enlightenment can ever be approved spiritually, it has always been the open as well as the private teaching of real Initiates that Social Regeneration is the great intent of all true Mystic Schools.

Turning again to Forlong’s Chart for illustrative examples, we find the colors employed are Red, Blue, Green, Pink, Brown, Violet and Yellow. Worship of Fetiches is marked at the very beginning of the record and takes historic rank with Charms and Amulets, which were venerated everywhere in the remotest ages of which we possess any definite or authentic record. Three quite distinct, but for long contemporary, objects of world-wide veneration were the Tree, pictured appropriately in green; the Lingam and Yoni, sacred to Phallic Faiths, portrayed in yellow; and the Serpent, portrayed in brown, doubtless to suggest the earth on which the serpent moves. These three especially ancient Emblems all interblend and at length become merged, or at least united, in the Sacred Ritual of ancient Egypt, accounts of which are now quite easily procurable. About 3000 B. C., according to Forlong’s reckoning, there were great wars between Jovites and Titanites and between Solar and Lunar worshipers. At this distance of time it is not necessary to attempt to enter elaborately into the causes and nature of these conflicts, but it does certainly appear that the position of the opposite sexes, as objects of veneration, was often a burning point of controversy in olden times.

With recent dissertations concerning Atlantis the antiquity of ancient Faiths seems much greater than before that once mighty submerged Island-continent became a subject of popular research, as it had not become when Forlong's Chart was originally issued, but though LePlongeon and other indefatigable students of antiquity quite clearly trace all Oriental and Occidental beliefs and practices to their common home in Atlantis, it is highly probable that the dispersion of religious systems rapidly spread at the time of the breaking up of that mysterious land, the last remnants of which are said to have finally collapsed very nearly 10,000 years before the commencement of the Christian Era.

This great event may well account for the existence of a specific traceable chronology carrying us back to 10,000 B. C., but no further.

Definite and simple Theism, within the present historic period (traced in vivid red on Forlong’s Chart) is not made to appear earlier than 2,400 B. C. Intensely interesting, and instructive also, though these graphically formulated statements prove there must always be some doubt as to precise historic accuracy, though none whatever as to the real prevalence of different Religious Systems and very little as to the effect which each is logically calculated to exert upon its faithful devotees.

This point conceded, we must be prepared to go a definite step further, and consider that all Systems have their letter and their spirit, and while the letter is always crude, and sometimes even barbaric, the spirit is pure and gentle, reminding us of nuts, which have hard indigestible exterior shells while they are inwardly delicious and nutritious.

“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” is not a text that can apply alone to the Mosaic Law, or to any other portions of the Bible of the Jew and of the Christian; it is applicable to every record accounted sacred by any section of mankind. Is there then no place remaining in these modern days for missionary enterprise? There is a vast new field opening for missionary endeavor, but the coming missionary must be a man or woman widely awake to the actual needs of our present humanity, which greatly needs convincing of the unity of all religious systems at their core. The letter of all systems is in process of sure disintegration and in this dissolving process many observers think they see the growing disappearance of religion itself from earth. In this surmise they must soon find themselves mistaken, for actual discovery of the roots of all religious trees is leading multitudes to accept, not Atheism but Theosophy. Annie Besant is not the only brilliant worker in the ranks of Atheistic propaganda who has discovered its pitiful unsatisfactoriness, though she has proved an exceptionally prominent and influential example in this connection. Prof. Charles Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, has undoubtedly, to some extent, correctly outlined the religion of the future, but that religion may have many other excellent aspects besides those which this kindly veteran educator has vigorously emphasized. The religion of the future is certainly in the making, and though it can be neither wished nor expected that it will be an entirely new production, it is not unduly optimistic or presumptuous to predict that it will contain all that is worth preserving in the heritages we have gathered from the past, but as new times require new applications of eternal verities, we must not imagine that anything worth preserving is being swept away because old truth is being freshly garmented and the present generation is voicing the Wisdom of the Ages in a language of its own.