Christianity and Modern ThoughtPeabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Religion
Christianity and Modern Thought
Peabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Unitarianism
In the new church, in that _basilica_, what do we find? We find holy
water at the door. That was exactly what you found in the pagan temple,
only it was called lustral water. In the temple, my Scipio, who goes
with me, recognizes all his old habits of thought, all the old emblems
of his religious devotion. He sees a number of statues, or images; but
he has seen those all his life. There is not only a central shrine, but
there are small chapels. The saints have a golden circle round their
heads: Christians call it the _aura_, the ancients called it the
_nimbus_; but it was exactly the same thing. They had it around the
heads of their deities in painting and sculpture, and so on. There are
censers and there are tapers burning there; and there are all the
ornaments a pagan was accustomed to see in his temple. All those things
had been kept, had been re-established, and the pagans had brought them
with them into the Catholic churches. When I went for the first time to
Naples, the man who showed me the museum there showed me feet, legs, and
arms, hands, eyes, and ears, in stone. He said, "These are _ex voto_."
People who were ill gave to some of the gods, the ones they chose, these
things as marks of gratitude for having been cured. The cicerone told
me, "You see, sir, it is exactly the same thing we have in our
churches." And so it is. In all the churches in Naples and Rome, and in
the Roman Catholic churches all over Spain and France, you see, in wax,
in gold, in silver, and in stone, such legs and arms, eyes and ears. It
is exactly the same thing. The heathen man said to his god, "I will pay
you by this mark of honor and gratitude, by this mark of your power and
your glory, if you cure me." The Roman Catholic says exactly the same
thing to a saint, to the Virgin, sometimes to Jesus, and very rarely to
God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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