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Untitled Article
from a remote antiquity , religion is the most venerable for its age and its sanctity . Religion , under some form or other , is co-extensive with the human race ; but all the earliest indications of its existence prove it to have been , not so much the product of an inquiring reason , as an inherited possession . Whencesoever it came , it was trans- ;
in it ted from age to age by means of symbols ; with these symbols traditional expositions were originally connected , which in time ceased to be understood even by the priests , and thus a dead form was left in place of a living doctrine . To religion , however , notwithstanding its subsequent corruption , mankind are indebted for their earliest science and civilization . In the infancy of the
world , no division of intellectual , any more than of manual , labour existed ;—whatever man knew , whatever he thought , whatever he had discovered or invented , was thrown into one general depository , was given up to the keeping of the sacerdotal caste , and then delivered over , under the consecrated name of religion ^ for the benefit of coming generations . * All the most » polished nations of antiquity , '—it is remarked by Herder , — ' the Etruscans , Greeks , and Romans—received their knowledge out of the bosom and
under the veil of religious traditions ; from this source they derived their poetry and arts , their music and writing , their history and medicine , their natural philosophy and metaphysics , their astronomy and chronology , and even their ethics ancj political wisdom . The most ancient sages did nothing more than separate the seeds which were thus put into their hands , and then rear them as plants of their own ; by which means a development was commenced that afterwards went on with the course of centuries . Even the northern nations have had their
knowledge conveyed to them in the dress of religion * / These views , which are in unison with the most accurate researches of history , altogether refute the specious reasonings of those philosophers who suppose the human race to have been originally placed on the earth in a condition little superior to the brutes—to have made all their subsequent advances in civilization by the unaided exercise of their native powers—and , by the
working of an innate and spontaneous intelligence , to have raised themselves through all the intermediate gradations to that state of knowledge and refinement in which we now find the nations of modern Europe . Were this the case , ' as Herder very justly observes , ' we should still meet with nations devoid of reason and speech , and without any sense * of religion or morals , since men continue to subsist in their original condition on the earth . But , in fact , tjie inhabitants of Greenland , Kamschatka ,
and Terra del Fuego , all have their peculiar modes of expressing their moral and reli g ious feelings , as their legends and usages show ; and even should a few solitary instances be adduced from * 3 i > okj ; & . y . p . 33 & . ..... ..
Untitled Article
$ 6 The Philosophy of the History of Mankind .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 96, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/24/
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