Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser MysteriesBesant, Annie
Religion
Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries
Besant, Annie
Christianity -- Miscellanea; Mysticism; Theosophy
The reason, and, indeed, the justification, of the view taken by the
Comparative Mythologists is patent. They found in every direction low
forms of religious belief, existing among savage tribes. These were seen
to accompany general lack of civilisation. Regarding civilised men as
evolving from uncivilised, what more natural than to regard civilised
religion as evolving from uncivilised? It is the first obvious idea.
Only later and deeper study can show that the savages of to-day are not
our ancestral types, but are the degenerated offsprings of great
civilised stocks of the past, and that man in his infancy was not left
to grow up untrained, but was nursed and educated by his elders, from
whom he received his first guidance alike in religion and civilisation.
This view is being substantiated by such facts as those dwelt on by
Lang, and will presently raise the question, "Who were these elders, of
whom traditions are everywhere found?"
Still pursuing our enquiry, we come next to the question: To what people
were religions given? And here we come at once to the difficulty with
which every Founder of a religion must deal, that already spoken of as
bearing on the primary object of religion itself, the quickening of
human evolution, with its corollary that all grades of evolving humanity
must be considered by Him. Men are at every stage of evolution, from the
most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty
intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place
there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude
and simple polity. Even within any given civilisation we find the most
varied types--the most ignorant and the most educated, the most
thoughtful and the most careless, the most spiritual and the most
brutal; yet each one of these types must be reached, and each must be
helped in the place where he is. If evolution be true, this difficulty
is inevitable, and must be faced and overcome by the divine Teacher,
else will His work be a failure. If man is evolving as all around him
is evolving, these differences of development, these varied grades of
intelligence, must be a characteristic of humanity everywhere, and must
be provided for in each of the religions of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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