Part 12

Again, the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god of considerable importance. We shall trace out this idea more fully hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the present it must suffice to say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.

When we pass from the first plane of corpse preservation and mummification to the second plane, where burial is habitual, it might seem, at a hasty glance, as though continued worship of the dead, and their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. For we saw that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should return to plague the living. Nevertheless, natural affection for parents or friends, and the desire to insure their goodwill and aid, make these seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them; while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become, in time, altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.

Much of the Bible is evidently legendary. Here we have a jumble of ancient myths, allegories, and mysteries drawn from many sources and remote ages, and adapted, altered, and edited so many times that in many instances their original or inner meaning has become obscure. And it is folly to accept the tangled legends and blurred or distorted symbols as the literal history of a literal tribe, and the literal account of the origin of man, and the genesis of religion.

The real roots of religion lie far deeper: deeper, perhaps, than sun-worship, ghost-worship, and fear of demons. In The Real Origin of Religion occurs the following:

Quite recently theories have been advocated attempting to prove that the minds of early men were chiefly concerned with the increase of vegetation, and that their fancy played so much round the mysteries of plant growth that they made them their holiest arcana. Hence it appears that the savages were far more modest and refined than our civilised contemporaries, for almost all our works of imagination, both in literature and art, make human love their theme in all its aspects, whether healthy or pathological; whereas the savage, it seems, thought only of his crops. Nothing can be more astonishing than this discovery, if it be true, but there are many facts which might lead us to believe that the romance of love inspired early art and religion as well as modern thought.

And again:

Religion is a gorgeous efflorescence of human love. The tender passion has left its footsteps on the sands of time in magnificent monuments and libraries of theology.

This may seem startling to many orthodox readers, but it is no new theory, and is doubtless quite true, for all gods have been made by man, and all theologies have been evolved by man, and the odour and the colour of his human passions cling to them always, even after they are discarded. Under all man's dreams of eternal gods and eternal heavens lies man's passion for the eternal feminine. But on these subjects "Moses" spoke in parables, and I shall not speak at all.

Mr. Robertson, in Christianity and Mythology, says of the Bible:

It is a medley of early metaphysics and early fable--early, that is, relatively to known Hebrew history. It ties together two creation stories and two flood stories; it duplicates several sets of mythic personages--as Cain and Abel, Tubal-Cain and Jabal; it grafts the curse of Cham on the curse of Cain, making that finally the curse of Canaan; it tells the same offensive story twice of one patriarch and again of another; it gives an early "metaphysical" theory of the origin of death, life, and evil; it adapts the Egyptian story of the "Two Brothers," or the myth of Adonis, as the history of Joseph; it makes use of various God-names, pretending that they always stood for the same deity; it repeats traditions concerning mythic founders of races--if all this be not "a medley of early fable," what is it?

I quote next from The Bible and the Child, in which Dean Farrar says:

Some of the books of Scripture are separated from others by the interspace of a thousand years. They represent the fragmentary survival of Hebrew literature. They stand on very different levels of value, and even of morality. Read for centuries in an otiose, perfunctory, slavish, and superstitious manner, they have often been so egregiously misunderstood that many entire systems of interpretation--which were believed in for generations, and which fill many folios, now consigned to a happy oblivion-- are clearly proved to have been utterly baseless. Colossal usurpations of deadly import to the human race have been built, like inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a single misinterpreted text.

Compare those utterances of the freethinker and the divine, and then read the following words of Dean Farrar:

The manner in which the Higher Criticism has slowly and surely made its victorious progress, in spite of the most determined and exacerbated opposition, is a strong argument in its favour. It is exactly analogous to the way in which the truths of astronomy and of geology have triumphed over universal opposition. They were once anathematised as "infidel"; they are now accepted as axiomatic. I cannot name a single student or professor of any eminence in Great Britain who does not accept, with more or less modification, the main conclusions of the German school of critics.

This being the case, I ask, as a mere layman, what right has the Bible to usurp the title of "the word of God"? What evidence can be sharked up to show that it is any more a holy or an inspired book than any book of Thomas Carlyle's, or John Ruskin's, or William Morris'? What evidence is forthcoming that the Bible is true?

THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN SCIENCE

The theory of the early Christian Church was that the Earth was flat, like a plate, and the sky was a solid dome above it, like an inverted blue basin.

The Sun revolved round the Earth to give light by day, the Moon revolved round the Earth to give light by night. The stars were auxiliary lights, and had all been specially, and at the same time, created for the good of man.

God created the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Earth in six days. He created them by word, and He created them out of nothing.

The centre of the Universe was the Earth. The Sun was made to give light to the Earth by day, and the Moon to give light to Earth by night.

Any man who denied that theory in those days was in danger of being murdered as an Infidel.

To-day our ideas are very different. Hardly any educated man or woman in the world believes that the world is flat, or that the Sun revolves round the Earth, or that what we call the sky is a solid substance, like a domed ceiling.

Advanced thinkers, even amongst the Christians, believe that the world is round, that it is one of a series of planets revolving round the Sun, that the Sun is only one of many millions of other suns, that these suns were not created simultaneously, but at different periods, probably separated by millions or billions of years.

We have all, Christians and Infidels alike, been obliged to acknowledge that the Earth is not the centre of the whole Universe, but only a minor planet revolving around, and dependent upon, one of myriads of suns.

God, called by Christians "Our Heavenly Father," created all things. He created not only the world, but the whole universe. He is all-wise, He is all-powerful, He is all-loving, and He is revealed to us in the Scriptures.

Let us see. Let us try to imagine what kind of a God the creator of this Universe would be, and let us compare him with the God, or Gods, revealed to us in the Bible, and in the teachings of the Church.

We have seen the account of the Universe and its creation, as given in the revealed Scriptures. Let us now take a hasty view of the Universe and its creation as revealed to us by science.

What is the Universe like, as far as our limited knowledge goes?