On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
What do they imply ?—perhaps the solution of more than one tnetaphysical question may be facilitated by the researches of history . We have hitherto studied men too exclusively under one form of religion , in one state of civilization , and through the medium of one or two kindred literatures . The north and the east , Scandinavia stnd . Asia , are How beginning to open their unexplored treasures ; new arid wider views will be given of man , his character , capacity , and progress ; and the foundations laid of a more ptofound and comprehensive philosophy , in civilization , morals , and religion .
It is impossible to understand individual man , apart from the history of the species . His moral and intellectual nature , considered at any particular period of civilization , is the complex result of a thousand influences transmitted from the past ; his Reason is fashioned and made capable of further progress by the traditidh of his fathers * This view appears to us conclusive against the system of simple deism , which supposes a man placed in the midst of this universe , and by the mere exercise of his faculties on the phenomena around him , capable of reasoning out for himself , db novOj the doctrines of one Supreme Being , a providence £ trid a future life . This is what the wisest of philosophers has never yet done ; and with regard to the mass of mankind , universal experience testifies that they have no religious ideas , but what are Communicatedbv some positive instruction from without .
If then these religious ideas , in their most elementary state , be the deposit of tradition , the further question naturally arises , whence cdtiie that tradition originally , how has it been preserved to us , and how has it been modified in the course of its tr&nsmissiofi ? The answer to these questions leads almost necessarily , in our judgtnent , to the acknowledgment of a revelation primitive or occasional . We are enough of Syncretists ourselves , * much as we have said in reprobation of the Gnostic systems , to believe , that the fragments of some primeval revelation are yet existing among the scattered nations of the earth ,, embodied in many different forms ,, expressed by an endless variety of rites and symbols , blended with the most serious errors , and deformed by hideous
corruptions . We can hardly conceive how society should have begun to exist , without some such revelation . The individual requires the prompting of instinct , to commence his career , preparatory to the exercise of reason . A similar aid and stimulus must have been required for the infancy of the race . We may suppose that from that instinctive source flowed the primeval
* " Scilicet Syncretismum , quern receutiores vulgo appeilarunt , aut Uurixiv religionum omnium populoruna , saltern plurium , const it uere voluisse imperatorem dixeris ; lit iderri assequerentur , alio modo allabbrarurit philosophi , pltrumque placita interpretatione in conaeutum redigendo ; dum deriVAtionibus et propagationibus religionum aliarum a , b aliia , aut etiam * b uo& , inqubusrej modo ritus et ceremoniaa sacroruqi , modo doctrinas [ xrosequendo et comparando ; neo neganduvi est , cunotis rt / jaionibus iuociit' noHohem cUiquam ' icnsumque communem ?*— Heyne , Opuscul . vi . p . 183 .
Untitled Article
Spirit of GnoBticUnt . felt
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 611, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/27/
-