The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879Various
History
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, October 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
In his omniscience are embraced all human actions. He watches over all
things, and is far-seeing, and never sleeping. He is the infallible one;
"it is impossible to deceive him, the Ahura, who knows all things." He
sees man, and judges and chastises him, if he has not followed his law,
for from him comes the law of man, as well as the law of the world; from
him comes the science supreme among all other sciences, that of duty,
the knowledge of those things we ought to think, say, and do, and of
those things we ought neither to think, nor say, nor do. To the man who
has prayed well, thought, spoken, and acted well, he opens his
resplendent paradise; he opens hell to him who has not prayed and who
has thought, spoken, and done evil.
The Supreme God, the God of Heaven.
Thus the Aryans of Greece, of Italy, of India, and of Persia agree in
giving the highest place in their Pantheon to a supreme God who rules
the world and who has founded order, a God sovereign, omniscient, and
moral. Has this identical conception been formed in each of these cases
by four independent creations, or is it a common inheritance from the
Indo-European religion, and did the Aryan ancestors of the Greeks, of
the Latins, of the Hindoos, and of the Persians already know a supreme
God, an organizing, a sovereign, an omniscient, a moral God?
Although the latter hypothesis is more simple and more probable than the
former, it cannot, however, be taken at once as certain; because an
abstract and logical conception of this kind may very well have
developed itself at the same time among several nations, in an identical
and independent manner. To whomsoever looks upon it at any time and in
any place, the world can reveal the existence of a Supreme maker:
Socrates is not the disciple of the psalmist; yet the heavens reveal to
him, as to the Hebrew poet, the glory of the Lord. But if it be found
that the abstract conception is closely connected with a naturalistic
and material conception, and that the latter is identical in the four
religions, as it is known, on the other hand, that these four religions
have a common past, the hypothesis that this abstract conception is a
heritage of this past, and not a creation of the present, may rise to a
certainty.
Now, these Gods who organize the world, rule it and watch over it; this
Zeus, this Jupiter, this Varuna, this Ahura Mazda are not the
personifications of a simple abstract conception; they emerge from a
former naturalism, from which they are not yet quite detached; they
commenced by being gods of the heavens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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