Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Agnosticism; Miracles; Religion and science
to show that Jesus contemplated the evangelisation of the heathen:
... Did not the Apostles hear our Lord? and what was _their_
impression from what they heard? Is it not certain that the
Apostles did not gather this truth from His teaching? (Tract
85, p. 63).
He said, "Preach the Gospel to every creature." These words
_need_ have only meant "Bring all men to Christianity
through Judaism." Make them Jews, that they may enjoy
Christ's privileges, which are lodged in Judaism; teach them
those rites and ceremonies, circumcision and the like, which
hitherto have been dead ordinances, and now are living; and
so the Apostles seem to have understood them (_ibid_. p.
65).
So far as Nazarenism differentiated itself from contemporary orthodox
Judaism, it seems to have tended towards a revival of the ethical and
religious spirit of the prophetic age, accompanied by the belief in
Jesus as the Messiah, and by various accretions which had grown round
Judaism subsequently to the exile. To these belong the doctrines of
the Resurrection, of the Last Judgment, of Heaven and Hell; of the
hierarchy of good angels; of Satan and the hierarchy of evil spirits.
And there is very strong ground for believing that all these
doctrines, at least in the shapes in which they were held by the
post-exilic Jews, were derived from Persian and Babylonian[97]
sources, and are essentially of heathen origin.
How far Jesus positively sanctioned all these indrainings of
circumjacent Paganism into Judaism; how far any one has a right to
declare, that the refusal to accept one or other of these doctrines,
as ascertained verities, comes to the same thing as contradicting
Jesus, it appears to me not easy to say. But it is hardly less
difficult to conceive that he could have distinctly negatived any of
them; and, more especially, that demonology which has been accepted by
the Christian Churches, in every age and under all their mutual
antagonisms. But, I repeat my conviction that, whether Jesus
sanctioned the demonology of his time and nation or not, it is doomed.
The future of Christianity, as a dogmatic system and apart from the
old Israelitish ethics which it has appropriated and developed, lies
in the answer which mankind will eventually give to the question,
whether they are prepared to believe such stories as the Gadarene and
the pneumatological hypotheses which go with it, or not. My belief is
they will decline to do anything of the sort, whenever and wherever
their minds have been disciplined by science. And that discipline
must, and will, at once follow and lead the footsteps of advancing
civilisation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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