Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative TheologyClarke, James Freeman
Islamic
Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology
Clarke, James Freeman
Christianity and other religions; Religions
Both of these systems, as being essentially moral systems in the interest
of humanity, proceed from persons. For it is a curious fact, that, while
the essentially spiritualistic religions are ignorant of their founders,
all the moral creeds of the world proceed from a moral source, i.e. a
human will. Brahmanism, Gnosticism, the Sufism of Persia, the Mysteries of
Egypt and Greece, Neo-Platonism, the Christian Mysticism of the Middle
Ages,--these have, strictly speaking, no founder. Every tendency to the
abstract, to the infinite, ignores personality.[133] Individual mystics we
know, but never the founder of any such system. The religions in which the
moral element is depressed, as those of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece,
Rome, are also without personal founders. But moral religions are the
religions of persons, and so we have the systems of Confucius, Buddha,
Zoroaster, Moses, Mohammed.[134] The Protestant Reformation was a protest
of the moral nature against a religion which had become divorced from
morality. Accordingly we have Luther as the founder of Protestantism; but
mediæval Christianity grew up with no personal leader.
The whole religion of the Avesta revolves around the person of Zoroaster,
or Zarathustra. In the oldest part of the sacred books, the Gâthâs of the
Yaçna, he is called the _pure_ Zarathustra, good in thought, speech, and
work. It is said that Zarathustra alone knows the precepts of Ahura-Mazda
(Ormazd), and that he shall be made skilful in speech. In one of the
Gâthâs he expresses the desire of bringing knowledge to the pure, in the
power of Ormazd, so as to be to them strong joy (Spiegel, Gâthâ Ustvaiti,
XLII. 8), or, as Haug translates the same passage (Die Gâthâs des
Zarathustra, II. 8): "I will swear hostility to the liars, but be a strong
help to the truthful." He prays for truth, declares himself the most
faithful servant in the world of Ormazd the Wise One, and therefore begs
to know the best thing to do. As the Jewish prophets tried to escape their
mission, and called it a burden, and went to it "in the heat and
bitterness of their spirit," so Zoroaster says (according to Spiegel):
"When it came to me through your prayer, I thought that the spreading
abroad of your law through men was something difficult."
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