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472 &i)V ILtaHeT. [Saturday,
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Mackay' S Progress Of The Intellect. The...
But the known and the unknown are intimately connected and correlative . A superstructure of faith , can be securely built only an the foundations of the known . Philosophy and religion have one common aim ; they are but different forms of answer to the same great question , that of man and his destination . Though differing in name , character , and language , their mission is similar , and they grew up under varying circumstances to supply the same want . When the hnman understanding was first roused to contemplate the problem of its destination , it must have been instantly impressed with a sense of Its helplessness and incapacity to furnish from its own resources a satisfactory solution . The problem must
have been abandoned tn despair if tt had not been cleared up by the intervention of Heaven . Those consolatory suggestions of ever present nature which convey even to the savage a rough answer to the great difficulty , together with the most necessary elements of religious truth , were hailed on their first announcement with an avidity proportioned to the want of them , and deferentially received and adhered to as divine intimations . The growth of philosophy was checked by the premature establishment of religions . These had grown out of a kind of imperfect and unconscious philosophy , and
clothed in the poetic language of an early age had been reduced to a permanent system of dogmas and mythi calculated for a time to amuse and satisfy the doubts and aspirations of mankind . But religion divorced from philosophy became obsolete and inefficient . The great problem of nature recurred , and stronger and more intelligible evidence was required to justify the important results which religion had anticipated . Philosophy , properly so culled , arose along with sceptism ; when men were emboldened to appeal from authority to reason , to estimate the value of evidence , and to analyze the results of experience . "
Or this on symbolism : — There are , however , dangers inseparable from symbolism , which countervail its advantages , and afford an impressive lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of language . The very means necessary to familiarize the mind with objects of religious contemplation are as apt to bewilder as to enlighten it . The imagination , invited to assist the reason , usurps its place , or leaves its ally helplessly entangled in its web . The strong tendency to assign reality and objectivity to the merely conceptional misleads in proportion to the prevailing ignorance of psychological laws ; names which stand for things are confounded with them ; the means are mistaken for the end ; the instrument of
interpretation for the object . Symbols thus came to usurp an independent character as truths and persons ; and , though perhaps a necessary , they were at best but a dangerous path , through which to approach the Deity ; in which ' many , mistaking the sign for the thing signified , fell into a ridiculous superstition , while others , in avoiding one extreme , plunged into the no less hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety . ' The tendency to reaction , produced by these corruptions , has always stirred up the zeal of reformers , whether prophets or philosophers , to break through established forms , and either to restore the wholesome simplicity of original belief , or , at least , a creed more in unison with the advance of knowledge , more intelligibly founded in reason and nature . Such was the true mission and meaning of Mahomet and Buddha , of Xenophanes and Zoroaster ; of St . Paul , who ,
in his address to the Athenians , complains not of their irreligion , but of their superstition , and desires to replace their polytheism by a higher pantheism . These great reformers , as well as the Hebrew prophets , deeply felt the intellectual mischief arising out of a degraded idea of the Supreme Being ; and they claimed for their own God an existence or a personality distinct from the objects of ancient superstition . They disowned , in his name , the rites that had been offered to him , and the Bymbols and images , images of ' abomination' ' jealousy , ' which profaned his temple . They were thus led expressly to deny the most cherished boast of their countrymen , the authenticity and antiquity of their laws , and the purity of their early worship . Impressed with this important truth , they were insensible to danger , and were impelled by an irresistible and apparently superhuman influence to utter their convictions . In the ardour of
their beneficent enthusiasm , they implicitly believed the burden which overmastered their minds and prompted their utteranco to bo a revolution of divine truth . They wore not aware that the mind is most secure when least self confideut , and that the real essence of their mission was nut to replace one hallucination by another , but to convince it of its pronencss to self delusion , and to recal it from confounding its own imaginations with realities . They saw not that the utmost which can be effected by human effort is to substitute impressions relatively correct for others whose falsehood has been detected , and to replace a gross symbolism by a purer one . Every nmn , without being aware of it , worships a conception of
liia own mind ; for all symbolism , as well as all language , Rhares the subjective character of the ideas it represents . The reverential feeling which constitutes the religious sentiment is guided by a true and eternal instinct ; but the modes or forms of its manifestation are incomplete and progressive ; each term and symbol predicates a partial truth , » nd imperfectly describes the relation of the worshipper to the worshipped ; remaining always amenable to improvement or modification , and , in its turn , to he superseded by others more currectand comprehensive . Hence
the limits < if idolatry , or false worship , nre as difficult to determine as those of insanity . It becomes criminal only relatively to the condition and capabilities of the mind which practises it . Thesin it involves is a sin against knowledge , or Against intellectual caution ; it is the confounding the symbol with the thing signified , the substitution of a material for n mental object of worship , after a highpr spiritualism has become possible ; it consists in nit illjudged preference of tbo inferior to the superior symbol ; it is not so much a trniterous desertion of the Almigh'v , « s an inadequate and sensual eouecit'ion ol" Ijim f > r
tinmistaken worshipper acknowledges no higher power than that before which he bows , and the Baal whom he substitutes for Jehovah is still to his imagination God . " In his preface he gives a confessio fidei—a calm clear statement of what he conceives to be the highest existing philosophy of religion , where , amid the wrecks of creeds and systems , the duties of man to himself , to society , and to God , are seen arising out of the Xaws under which experience shows that God has placed us , and which are in fact Revelation . There is
no mysticism , no metaphysics—but quiet common sense elevated by long thought and lofty aim ; and the analysis , though not followed into minute detail , as far as it goes is admirable . After this brief account of our present position he enters upon his curious investigation of the stages through which we have passed on the road towards it . The investigation 3 s incomplete , it stops short with the dawn of Christianity ; and in the preceding period , though by no
means confining himself to the Greeks and Hebrews , he has left very much yet to be told of the Persian , the Indian , and the Egyptian Theosophies , which here appear only subordinately . Such as it is , however , it is by far the best work on the subject which has yet appeared in this or ( as far as we know ) in any language ; and although in many details we entirely refuse his conclusions , yet we seem to learn more from Mr . Mackay when we think him wrong than from other writers when we agree with them .
The mythology of Greece , so intolerable m the hands of moderns , becomes transparent with a beautiful meaning , viz ., as the first creed , the old nature worship , developing among the exquisitely organized Hellenic race into an elaborate Pantheon where Pantheism alternated with Polytheism , and the gods appear at one time as really many , at another as one Universal Being under many aspects . Like all critics he is a grievous Iconoclast ; yet if it is a shock to us to learn that Homer ' s heroes were not deified
men , but local gods who had put off their immortal nature to figure on a human stage , we have gained in the exchange when we have learnt better what the spirit was which made Homer and Homeric life a possibility . Whether we believe or not that the poets of the historic period kept the under meaning of their mj'ths in view in constructing their works , yet the fact of the under meaning explains the existence of the strange material ; it clears up many hitherto hopeless obscurities ; and stories which had looked ( so many of
them ) like the mere wanton overflowings of irreverent sensuality are seen to have had their origin in really spiritual mysteries . Mr . Mackay disarms criticism in his very modest preface by saying that the positive form which he has given to his interpretations is not to imply that he is positive or dogmatic about them , but is only to spare to us the innumerable apologies and explanations which would have quadrupled the labour of writer and of reader . As they stand , however , we must treat them as his own convictions ; and
in spite of his great authority , we think he follows his allegories into impossible details , and at times takes strange liberties with the Greek in the chase . In his anxiety to interpret the Hall of Alcinous into the Elysian fields , he renders the statues of the youths [ holding torches to give light ] by night , into •' children of tho night ; " and Halius and Laodamas , two Phceacian youths shying balls into the air . reckless
of quantity , and on the faith of obscure etymology , ho converts into the Sun and Pluto playing bail oniony the clouds . Prometheus is a sufficiently close parallel to Christ without being made to have been crucified ; < rTccvpa & et < i in old Greek means inhaled . Mr . Mackay must have been betrayed by some German critic . Ho is too good a scholar to have fallen into mistakes of that kind of his own accord .
It is his general fault , however , if we may venture to say so , that ho explains Myths too closely , and metaphors too literally . In the Greek dovolopment the inner life was so intense that tho outer or traditional hung round it merely as a drapery , and was arranged to suit the taste of any or of every artist . It was aenrcoly thought to bo more vital than a dress , and followed few laws , and was subject to few criteria except those of grace and beauty . Curiously enough the same was tho case with tho Catholic legends , and ia perhaps the only condition in which healthy culture id possiblo under a theology ; yet , alas , carrying with it the seeds of its own retribution . Tho inner lifo of
all traditional religion dies at last . Tho dress is identified with tho substance , and becomes , as it over has boeorno , a T > ctrmira robo of poison tearing ff ^ sh from bonr for : \ U who wear it .
Mr . Mackay has , however , most admirabl y and successfully detected the common elemental source of all the religions of the world , which , like language , assumed only varied forms and colours in the different nationalities . Originally the same simple worship of the elements , he has shewn also that in its development it has followed everywhere certain broad common laws which belong to our common human nature ; and that in Hebrew as well as Greek parallel stages maybe traced all along their history till
the ultimate union of their thought , out of which arose Christianity . They need not have ori ginally sprung out of the same source . Less artificial than language , creeds with very close resemblance may easily have had many origins , as the rose of Cashmere need not have been genealogically one with the rose of Engaddi . But the further unity in the laws of growtJi which Mr . Mackay has discovered is far more curious , and is what gives his book its great scientific value . Myth , as he shows us , is the record
not of fact but of opinion , and , in describing the formation of opinion , he has painted for us a succession of beautiful images in whose singular mosaic the Greek , the Hebrew , the Chaldee , the Indian , the Celt , the Scythian , interchange their traditions , and it is , in fact , not the history of this or that people , that he has given us , but the history of the human mind . The elements first reverenced as invisible forces , are seen first passing into Titanic persons , and again , as pure r notions of God began to form themselves , dethroned by younger dynasties . Next , as the unity of God
grew out , as becoming fallen spirits , who in old times had warred against the sons of God , and exhibitinjr in mystic figures the war of nature , of light and dark winter and summer , death and life . The old Titan struggle reappears in two strange allusions in the book of Job : Mr . Mackay teaches us to see an imprisoned giant in the bound Orion ( or Chesil ) , and in Leviathan , Rahab , or Draco " the crooked serpent transfixed in olden time by the power of Jehovah and suspended as a glittering trophy across the northern skj r . "
We cannot attempt to follow him through this curious problem . But nothing is more important at the present time than to show that the theology of the Hebrew followed the same laws , started from a similar origin , and was subject to the same imperfections as that of the other nations who were lefc to themselves . If Mr . Mackay does the Hebrew less than justice in believing that theology assumed or retained for a longer period among them those dark and terrible
features which made religion a curse instead of a blessing , it is perhaps no more than a just retribution on them for their claims of exclusive divine favour . Yet we regret much of what he has said . The Hebrews have crimes enough to answer for without deepening the shadows against them , and it is scarcely fair to accept their traditions as genuine whenever they witness against themselves , while everything of a redeeming character is set aside as spurious or recent .
Mr . Mackay s theory , however ( it will be this part of his book which will attract the first and most bitter notice ) , is that the early Jewish God , the God El , Phoenician Ilus , was substantially little different from the being who was afterwards Moloch , the rival and enemy of Jehovah—the savage bloody god to whom human sacrifices were offered , as to the
Greek Cronos ; and that , only at a late period , as late as n . c . 700 , and parallel to the religious reformation all over the world , he was dethroned in the higher feelings of the later Hebrews by Jehovah , as Cronos was by Zeus . The massacres in the wilderness , and afterwards in Canaan , wore sacrifices to this demon . The passover was a frightful right of the same kind . He sees the same character in the stories of
Abraham and of Jephthah . In the Prophets he finds evidence of a continuance of human sacrifices to the hereditary pod of the Hebrews , as late as the reign proceeding tho captivity , and in Amos , v . 25-0 , an indignant denial on the part of the late Jehovah of having been the god of their earlier history . That particular passage seems to us ( as it certainly did to St . Stephen , who quotes it in his last speech ) to
prove the very opposite of what Mr . Mackay would extract from it ; and , although the historic portions of tho Old Testament are beyond doubt very late indeed , and were compiled by some most uncritical person out of various and irreconcilable traditions , we are inclined to think , in spite of Mr . Mackay , that the old idea is truer than his , and that the Hebrews began with a better faith out of which they were continually lapsing . Let . David have been what he
472 &I)V Iltahet. [Saturday,
472 & i ) V ILtaHeT . [ Saturday ,
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 10, 1850, page 16, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_10081850/page/16/
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