The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
Chap. 3. Content. State of the Heathen World ... Heathenism to be judged as Christians would wish their own religion to be judged ... The Pacific Age ... The genius of Paganism most tolerant and philosophical ...Vast difference between the philosophers and the vulgar ... The philosophers were Deists ...The vulgar infinitely credulous.
[LN. Characters mentioned in this chapter include. Orosius (Paulus Orosius, was a Gallaecian Chalcedonian priest, theologian and historian. Janus, the two faced Roman god of portals, see SV. Mosheim, (Johann Lorenz von Mosheim) 1693 to 1755, was a German Lutheran church historian. Homer. Jove, Roman god. Thor of the Celts. Grecian Apollo, the Phoenician Adonis, the Aesculapius of Athens, the Osiris of Egypt, the Krishna of India. Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus.]
introduction
It is manifestly unworthy of any cause, in itself containing an intrinsic and independent excellence, that its advocates should condescend to set it off by a foil, or to act as if they thought it necessary to decry and disparage the pretensions of others, in order to magnify and exalt their own. It is certain that the vileness of falsehood can add nothing to the glory of truth. Showing the various systems of heathen idolatry to be, how vile so-ever, would be adducing neither evidence nor even presumption for the proof of the divinity of a system of religion that was not so vile, or even if you please, say infinitely superior; as a beautiful woman would certainly feel it to be but an ill compliment to her beauty, to have it constantly obtruded upon her observance, how hideously deformed and monstrously ugly were those, than whom she was so much more beautiful.
As it would not be fair to take up our notion of the Christian religion, from the lowest and most ignorant of its professors, and still less, perhaps, to estimate its merits, by the representations which its known and avowed enemies would be likely to give; the balance of equal justice on the other side, will forbid our forming our estimate of the ancient paganism from the misconceptions of its unworthy votaries, or the interested detractions and exaggerations of its Christian opponents.
The only just and honourable estimate will be that which shall judge of paganism, as Christians would wish their own religion to be judged - by its own absolute documents, by the representations of its advocates, and the admissions of its adversaries. [LN., for is not one of Jesus' precepts 'do unto others as you have them do unto you?]
Considerations
When it is borne in mind, that a supernatural origination or divine authority is not claimed for these systems of theology, there can be no occasion to fear their rivalry or encroachment on systems founded on such a claim; and still less, to decry, vituperate, and scandalize these, as any means of exalting or magnifying those. There cannot be the least doubt, that in dark and barbarous ages, the rude and unlettered part of mankind would grossly pervert the mystical or allegorical sense, if such there were, in the forms of religion propounded to their observance or imposed on their simplicity; while it is impossible, that those enlightened and philosophical characters, who have left us in their writings the most undoubted evidence of the greatest shrewdness of intellect, extent of inquiry, and goodness of heart, should have understood their mythology in no better or higher significance than as it was understood by the ignorant of their own persuasion, or would be represented by their enemies, who had the strongest possible interest in defaming and decrying it. When the worst is done in this way, Christianity would be but little the gainer by being weighed in the same scales. Should we be allowed to fix on the darkest day of her eleven hundred years of dark ages, and to pit the grossest notions of the grossest ignorance of that day, as specimens of Christianity; against the views which Christians have been generally pleased to give as representations of paganism; how would they abide the challenge,
"look on this picture and on this?"
Those doctrines only, of which no form or forms of the previously existing paganism could ever pretend the same or the like doctrines, can be properly and distinctively called Christian. That degree of excellence., whose very lowest stage is raised above the very highest acme of what is known and admitted to have been no more than human, can alone put in a challenge to be regarded as divine. That which was not known before, is that only which a subsequent revelation can have, taught.
To justify the claims, therefore, of such a subsequent revelation, we must make the full allowance, and entirely strike out of the equation, all quantities estimated to their fullest and utmost appreciation, which are, and have been claimed as the property of pre-existent systems; and as they were not divine, while it is pretended that this is, the discovery of a resemblance between the one and the other, can only be feared by those who are conscious that they are making a false pretence. Resemblance to a counterfeit is, in this assay, proof of a counterfeit. Brass may sometimes be brought to look like gold, but the pure gold had never yet the ring and imperfections of any baser metal.
Circumstances
At the time alleged as that of the birth of Jesus, all nations were living in the peaceful profession and practice of the several systems of religious faith which they had, as nations or as families, derived from their ancestors, in an antiquity lying far beyond the records of historical commemoration. Christians generally claim for this epoch of time the truly honourable distinction of being the pacific age [Mosheim, Vol. I. Chap. 1.] The benign influence of letters and philosophy, was at this time extensively diffused through countries which had previously lain under the darkest ignorance; and nations, whose manners had been savage and barbarous, were civilized by the laws and commerce of the Romans. The Christian writer Orosius, maintains that the temple of Janus was then shut, and that wars and discords had absolutely ceased throughout the world: which, though an allegorical, and very probably a hyperbolical representation of the matter, is at least an honourable testimony to the then state of the heathen world.
The Universal God
The notion of one supreme being was universal. No calumny could be more egregious, than that which charges the pagan world with ever having lost sight of that notion, or compromised or surrendered its paramount importance, in all the varieties and modifications of pagan piety. [g] This predominant notion (admits Mosheim, showed itself, even, through the darkness of the grossest idolatry.
[g] All the inferior deities in Homer, are represented as thus addressing the supreme Jove
"Oh, first and greatest, GOD! by gods adored,
we own thy power, our father and our lord." - Iliad.]
The candour which gives the Protestant Christian credit for his professed belief in the unity of God, even against the conflict of his own assertion of believing at the same time in a trinity of three persons, which are each of them a God; the fairness which respects the distinction which the Catholic Christian challenges between his Latria and Doulia, his worship of the Almighty, and his veneration of the images of the saints, will never suppose that the divinity of the inferior deities was understood in any sense of disparagement to the alone supreme and undivided godhead of their "one first - one greatest - only Lord of all."
The evidences of Christianity must be in a labouring condition indeed, if they require us to imagine that a Cicero, Tacitus, or Pliny were worshippers of gods of wood and stone; or to force on our apprehensions such a violence, as that we should imagine that the mighty mind that had enriched the world with Euclid's Elements of Geometry, could have bowed to the deities of Euclid's Egypt, and worshipped leeks and crocodiles.
Orthodoxy itself will no longer suggest its resistance to the only faithful and rational account of the matter, so elegantly given us by Gibbon. [h] The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered, by the people, as equally true, - by the philosopher, as equally false, - and by the magistrate, as equally useful. [LN., Napoleon said; 'look upon religions as the work of men, but to respect them everywhere as a powerful engine-[tool] of government...']
[h] The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1. Ch. 2. p. 46.]
"Both the interests of the priests, and the credulity of his people were sufficiently respected. In their writings and conversation, the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason; but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and custom. Viewing with a smile of pity and indulgence the various errors of the vulgar, they diligently practised the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods; and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robe. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith, or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume; and they approached with the same inward contempt and the same external reverence to the altars of the Libyan, the Olympian, or the Capitoline Jupiter." [Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1. p. 49, 50.]
It was a common adage among the Greeks, [GK] - Miracles for fools; and the same proverb obtained among the shrewder Romans, in the saying, Yulgus vult decipi - decipiatur, "The common people like to be deceived - deceived let them be."
Christian Supremacy?
The Christian, perhaps, may boast of his sincerity, but a moment's thought will admonish him how little virtue there is in such a quality, when it forces a necessity of hypocrisy on others. Sincerity should be safe on both sides of the hedge. It was never taken for a virtue in an unbeliever.
"Every nation then had its respective gods, over which presided one more excellent than the rest;" and the degree of this pre-eminency, as versified by Pope from the 6th book of the Iliad, is an absolute vindication of the Pagan world from the charge of the grosser and more revolting sense of Polytheism. They were virtually Deists. Names of their divinities were thought to approach nearer to the supremacy of the father of gods and men than, the various orders of the Cherubim and Seraphim, to the God and Father of Jesus Christ,
"- who but behold his utmost skirts of glory,
and far off, his steps adore."
So, in the language of their Iliad (and language has nothing more sublime) we read the august challenge: -
"Let down our golden everlasting chain,
whose strong embrace holds heaven, and earth, and main;
strive all of mortal or immortal birth,
to drag by this the Thunderer down to earth.
Ye strive in vain, if I but lift this hand,
I heave the heavens, the ocean, and the land;
for such I reign unbounded and above,
and such are men, and gods, compared to Jove."
Mosheim, upon an evident misunderstanding, assumes that their supreme deity, in comparison to whom the gods and goddesses were as far off from an absolute divinity, as ever were the guardian angels and tutelary saints of Christianity; was himself believed to be subject to the rigid empire of the fates, or what the philosophers called eternal necessity. But the word fate, by its derivation from the natural indication of command - Fiat! Be it so; may satisfy us, that nothing more was meant, than that the supreme deity was bound by his own engagements, that his word was irrevocable, and that all his actions were determined and guided by the everlasting law of righteousness and conformed to the counsels and sanctions of his own unerring mind. So that He, and He alone, could say with truth,
"Necessity and Chance approach me not, and what I will - is fate."
Religious tolerance not war
"One thing, indeed," says our authority, (Mosheim), "appears at first sight very remarkable - that the variety of religions and gods in the heathen world, neither produced wars nor dissentions among the different nations." [Their religion had not made fools of them.] A diligent and candid investigation of historical data will demonstrate, that from this general rule, there is no valid and satisfactory instance of exception. The Greeks may have carried on a war to recover lands that had been distrained from the possession of their priests; and the Egyptians may have revenged the slaughter of their crocodiles; but these wars never proposed as their object, the insolent intolerance of forcing their modes of faith or worship on other nations. They were not offended at their neighbours for serving other divinities, but they could not bear that theirs, should be put to death. And if, perhaps, where we read the word divinities, we should understand it to mean nothing more than favourites; and instead of saying that people worshipped such and such things, that they were excessively or foolishly attached to them; considering that such language owes its original modification to Christian antipathies, it might be brought back to a nearer affinity to probability, as well as to charity.
An Egyptian might be as fond at onions, as a Welshman of leeks, a Scot of thistles, or an Irishman of shamrock, without exactly taking their garbage for omnipotence.
[Who that wished to be a thriving wooer, ever hesitated to drop on his knee and adore his mistress? "With my body I thee worship." - Matrimonial Service]
"Each nation suffered its neighbours to follow their own method of worship, to adore their own gods, to enjoy their own rites and ceremonies, and discovered no displeasure at their diversity of sentiments in religious matters. They all looked upon the world as one great empire, divided into various provinces, over every one of which, a certain order of divinities presided, and that, therefore, none could behold with contempt the gods of other nations, or force strangers to pay homage to theirs.
The Romans exercised this toleration in the amplest manner. As the sources from which all men's ideas are derived, are the same, namely, from their senses, there being no other inlet to the mind but thereby, there is nothing wonderful in the general prevalence of a sameness of the ideas of human beings in all regions and all ages of the world. The affections of fear, grief, pain, hope, pleasure, gratitude, &c, are as common to man as his nature as a man and could not fail to produce a corresponding similarity in the objects of his superstitious veneration. To have nothing in common with the already established notions of mankind, to bear no features of resemblance to their hallucinations and follies, to be nothing like them, to be to nothing so unlike, should be the essential predications and necessary credentials of the "wisdom which is from above."
It has, however, been alleged by learned men, with convincing arguments of probability, "that the principal deities of all the Gentile nations resembled each other extremely, in their essential characters; and if so, their receiving the same names could not introduce much confusion into mythology, since they were probably derived from one common source. If the Thor of the ancient Celts, was the same in dignity, character, and attributes with the Jupiter of the Greeks and Romans, where was the impropriety of giving him the same name? Dies Jovis is still the Latin form for our Thor's day. When the Greeks found in other countries deities that resembled their own, they persuaded the worshippers of those foreign gods that their deities were the same that were honoured in Greece, and were, indeed, themselves convinced that this was the case. In consequence of this, the Greeks gave the names of their gods to those of other nations, and the Romans in this followed their example.
Hence, we find the names of Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, &c, frequently mentioned in the more recent monuments and inscriptions which have been found among the Gaul's and Germans, though the ancient inhabitants of those countries had worshipped no gods under such denominations." - Note in Mosheim.
To have been goddess-born, heaven-descended; to have "lived and died as none could live and die," to have been believed to have done and suffered great things for the service of mankind, but above all, to have propitiated the wrath of the Superior Deity, and to have conquered the invisible authors of mischief, in their behalf, was such an overwhelming draft on the tender feelings, the excitement of which is one of the strongest sources of pleasure in our nature, that the best hearts and the weakest heads never gave place to the coolness and apathy of scepticism. Not a doubt was entertained that a similar series of adventures was proof of one and the same hero, and that the Grecian Apollo, the Phoenician Adonis, the Aesculapius of Athens, the Osiris of Egypt, the Christ of India, were but various names of the self-same deity; so that nothing was so easy at any time, as the business of conversion. Not incredulity, but credulity, is the characteristic propensity of mankind.
Common interest, adoption and adaption
A disposition to adopt the religious ceremonies of other nations, to multiply the objects of faith, to listen with eagerness to anything that was offered to them under a profession of novelty, to believe every pretence to divine revelation, and to embrace every creed, presents itself in the history of almost every society of men, and is found as inalienable a characteristic of uncivilized, or but partially civilized man, as cunning is of the fox, and courage of the lion. Unbelief is no sin that ignorance was ever capable of being guilty of; to suspect it of the Gentile nations previous to the Christian era, is to outrage all inferences of our own experience, and to suppose the human race in former times to have been a different species of animals from any of which the wonder-loving and credulous vulgar of our own days could be the descendants.
Of all miracles that could possibly be imagined, the miracle of a miracle not being believed, would be the most miraculous, the most incongruous in its character, and the nearest to the involving a contradiction in its terms. If proof of a truth so obvious were not superfluous, the Christian might be commended to the consideration of authorities, to whose decision he is trained and disposed to submit.
His Paul of Tarsus finds, in the city of Athens, an altar erected to the Unknown Gods; [a] and taking what Le Clerc considers a justifiable liberty with the inscription, compliments the citizens on such a proof of their predisposition to receive the God whom he propounded to them, or any other, as well without evidence as with it, and to be converted without putting him to the trouble of a miracle. Acts 17. 22.
The inhabitants of Lystra, upon only hearing of the most equivocal and suspicious case of wonderment that could well be imagined, even that a lame beggar, who might have been hired for the purpose, or probably had never been lame at all, had been cured, or imagined himself cured, by two entire strangers, itinerant Therapeutse, or tramping, quack-doctors, without either inquiry or doubt, setup the cry, "That Jupiter and Mercury were come down from heaven in the shape of these quack-doctors;" and with all the doctors themselves could do to check the intensity of their devotion, "scarce restrained they the people that they had not done sacrifice." - Acts 14. 18.
[a] "Quamvis plurali numero Iegeretur inscriptio [GK] recte de Deo Ignoto, locutus est Paulus. Quia plurali numero continetur singularis." - Cleric. H. G. A. 52. p. 374. There is sufficient evidence, however, that Paul read the inscription correctly; so that the commentator's ready quibble is not called for. The various translations given of this text, make a good specimen of the difficulty of coming at the real sense of any ancient legends.
THE GREEK. [Note, LN. I have omitted the Greek version, as I do not have a Greek keyboard, THE LATIN, in all cases is true to the original texts, in all cases, not without regard to the teacher, 'Even monkeys fall out of trees.']
The Latin of [a] Stans autem Paulus in medio Areo pagi, ait, Viri Athenensis, per omnia quasi superstitiones vos aspicio.
1. Dr Lardner's Translation. "Paul, therefore, standing up in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are in all things very religious."
2. Unitarian Version. "Then Paul stood in the midst of the court of Areopagus, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that ye are exceedingly addicted to the worship of demons."
3. Archbishop Newcomb Version. "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are somewhat too religious."
4. Common Version. "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious." These various translators, however, did not mean exactly to discover, that religion and superstition were convertible terms. - Six, is one thing, and half a dozen is another.]
-o0o-
Next. Chapter IV. Chapter. IV. - The state of the Jews ... The Jews the grand exception to the prevalence of universal toleration ... They plagiarized Pagan fables into their pretended divine theology ... Were as gross idolaters as the Heathens ... Truth of Judaism not essential to the truth of Christianity ... The Pharisees ... The Sadducees ... The Cabbala ... The Jews had no notion of the immortality of the soul; while the Heathens had more practical faith therein, than any Christians of the present day.