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Untitled Article
his translator , would make them very scanty indeed . We are not certain , however , whether , on many neutral points , they might not , even though composed in a somewhat later age , be still safely regarded as the repositories of very early traditionary information . Great , however , as is the obscurity in which what may be esteemed fixed and certain historical records must leave any one who seeks to write an accurate history , or to picture to himself any thing like a graphic
developement of the state of society during the age to which we refer , our curiosity is certainly in an equal degree excited by all that we do know . No one who puts together in his mind for a moment the elements on which the new order of things was working , and the ferment in which the human mind was at the same time agitated , not only between contending religions but contending philosophies , literatures and political institutions , can help feeling how many topics there are of the highest interest and curiosity which have only inferences and analogies for their elucidation , and which it is in vain now to expect to develope historically .
Is not this , we have some times asked , that sort of state of things which it is justifiable and desirable to endeavour to exhibit in a form wherein the details can be filled up in the best way which analogy and deduction can afford ;—wherein a personal interest can be given to the history;—wherein the scattered lights , which appear here and there in various quarters , can , no doubt sometimes hypothetically , but still on reasonable and probable grounds
of inference , be concentrated and applied ;—and wherein the operation of principles , prejudices , customs and opinions to which the mind is now a total stranger , can be most vividly exemplified and displayed , so as to form what the mind wants to form , an entirely new picture ? We have seen , in the " Pilgrimage of Helon , " what an interest can be given to the feelings and social customs of the Jews ; how what would otherwise be tedious and confined
to the learned , as mere points of learned research , can , by a judicious application to actual life , become highly interesting to all , and can be fixed on the memory . In a story , published a few years ago , called Valerius , ( though much more of a story than is at all necessary for the purpose , ) the actual collision between Christian and Heathen principles at Rome , in the earliest ages of Christianity , was well and strongly drawn ; and why might not a more useful , and certainly a more interesting , result arise from a similar developement of the frame of society in the East ;—say in the latter part of the first and the beginning of the second century ?
What we should contemplate is not a work of fiction , for the mere purpose of interest , as a history ; but some personal narrative as a frame into which to work a connected view of the rise and progress of the new opinions , in their varied operations upon what would be shewn to be the elements in which they had to work . The state of the Jews , the Greeks , and the
Eastern nations , their sects , opinions and habits , and the moral , political or philosophic causes which would contribute to hasten or retard their conversion ; the difference between the Jew and Gentile branches of the early churches , and the progress towards their amalgamation ; the state of the Jewish settlers in the various cities of the empire , particularly as compared with the state of opinion and literature of their brethren in Judea , and
the mode b y which they became the channels of operation upon the population of those cities ; the manners and influence of the Essenes , upon either hypothesis as to their particular opinions ; the state and practical influence of the prevalent systems of Heathen philosophy ; the general literary and philosophic activity of these times ; their predisposition to the reception of new topics of inquiry , and the practical influence of this state of
Untitled Article
433 R&vtew . —Cavd ' s Primitive Christianity .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1827, page 438, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1797/page/46/
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