Ancient Faiths And Modern. Thomas Inman
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