The ancient nations, in their entire ignorance of the philosophy of the
human mind, and the laws controlling its actions, always accounted for
the appearance of great men amongst them by supposing them to be Gods.
Every country occasionally produced a man, who, by virtue of natural
superiority, rose so high in the scale of moral and intellectual
greatness as to fill the ideal of the people with respect to the
characteristics of a God. So low, so limited, so narrow, so greatly
circumscribed were the conceptions of deity, of the undeveloped and
intellectually dwarfed minds of all religious countries in that age,
that a man had to rise but a few degrees above the common level of the
populace to become a God. He could "easily fill the bill," and exhibit
all the qualities they assigned to the highest God in the heavens.
And this is as true of the Jewish mind as that of any other nation, a
portion of whom adored Jesus as a God. Or if they lacked anything in
natural inclination, they made it up by imitation, a propensity which
they possessed in no small degree, that is, a proneness to imitate the
customs of other nations.
Mr. Higgins tells us that "men of brilliant intellects and high moral
attainments, and great healers (of which Christ was one), were almost
certain to be deified." In like manner Archbishop Tillotson says, "they
deified famous and eminent persons by advancing them after their death
to the dignity of an inferior kind of Gods fit to be worshiped by men
on earth." Mark the expression, "after their death" We have shown in
another chapter that Jesus Christ was not generally considered a God,
even by his followers, till more than three hundred years after
his death, when Constantine declared him to be "God of very God"--a
circumstance of itself sufficient to establish the conclusion that
he did not possess this character. A God would be adored as such by
everybody while living, but a man's worshipers rise up after his death,
as in the case of "the man Christ Jesus." Great mental endowments,
or great moral attainments, would, in most countries, bring the most
ignorant down on their knees to worship such a man as a God. But it
re-quired years, and sometimes centuries, to get him fully established
among the Gods. This is as true of Jesus Christ as the other
human-descended deities. Whatever amount of homage Jesus might have
received while living, any person who will institute a thorough,
unbiased scrutiny in the case will discover that it was his great
healing powers and superior mental qualities which finally deified him.
His ignorant admirers knew no way of accounting for such extraordinary
qualities but to suppose him to be the embodiment of infinite wisdom.
Like the Chinaman who exclaimed, "See the God in that man," when an
Englishman cured a young woman of partial blindness by anointing her eyes
with kerosene. Such a deed would deify almost any man, in almost any
country, before the dawn of letters and the recognition of the science
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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