Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
the animals--and the angels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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