Ancient religion

“ Most of the ancient nations were controlled more or less by priests, who, as their power increased, instituted a caste to perpetuate their influence. Whether or not we hold the primitive religion of mankind to have been a pure theism, directly revealed by God,--which is my own conviction,--it is equally clear that the form of religion recorded in the earliest written records of poetry or legend was a worship of the sun and moon and planets. I believe this to have been a corruption of original theism; many think it to have been a stage of upward growth in the religious sense of primitive man. ”

“ After the decline of Nature-worship, and when through the constantly increasing power gained by the ruder elements in human society a knowledge of the scientific principles underlying ancient religion had been partially lost or forgotten, it became necessary for philosophers to conceal the original conception of the Deity and to clothe their sacred writings in allegory. ”

“ What Protestant, for instance, can be properly and permanently imbued with the fervent devotion or saint-like purity of the Catholic religion, or hope to transfer the pride, pomp, and pageantry of that detested superstition to his own canvass, with real feeling and con amore? What modern can enter fully into the spirit of the ancient Greek mythology, or rival the symmetry of its naked forms? ”

“ Such were the source and origin of the religion of the ancients; truly worthy of man, had he been capable of persisting in the purity and simplicity of these first principles: but the errors of the mind, and the vices of the heart, those sad effects of the corruption of human nature, have strangely disfigured their original beauty. ”

“ But inasmuch as more is known of the ancient methods by which the gods signified their will to men than of the reverse process, it will be convenient first to establish the unity of modern folklore with ancient religion in this division of the subject, and afterwards to discuss how any modern ideas concerning the means open to man of communicating with the gods may bear upon the less known corresponding department of ancient religion. ”

“ It appears that all the perfection of civilization, and all the advancement made in philosophy, science, and art among the ancients are due to those institutions which, under the veil of mystery, sought to illustrate the sublimest truths of religion, morality, and virtue, and impress them on the hearts of their disciples.* * * Their chief object was to teach the doctrine of one God, the resurrection of man to eternal life, the dignity of the human soul, and to lead the people to see the shadow of the deity, in the beauty, magnificence, and splendor of the universe. ”

“ Religion. Objects of worship. In religion, the ancient Romans, like the Greeks, personified the powers of nature, and also abstractions, like sowing, field labor, war, boundary, youth, health, harmony, fidelity. The profoundest worship was that of the tutelary deities, who presided over the household. Next to the deities of the house and forest, held in the greatest veneration, was Hercules, the god of the inclosed homestead, and, therefore, of property and gain. ”

“ Our people not only created the noblest religion of the ancient world, a religion which is destined to become the common property of the entire civilized world, but continued to develop it, keeping pace with the progress of the human spirit. ”

“ The new religion, as it has ever since been called, embodied all the precepts of the ancient faith, recognized the ancient mode of worship giving it a new sanction of the Great Spirit, and also comprehend such new doctrines as came in aptly, to lengthen out and enlarge the original system without impairing it. ”

“ Of old he might have been the ancient religious Athenian in the opening of Plato’s Republic, or Virgil’s aged gardener. The happiness of such natures would be incomplete without religion, but only by such tranquil and blessed souls can religion be accepted with no doubt or scruple, no dread, and no misgiving. ”

“ Theology.—The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not deus, a god, but rather numen, a power: he becomes deus when he obtains a name, and so is on the way to acquiring a definite personality, but in origin he is simply the 'spirit' of the 'animistic' period, and retains something of the spirit's characteristics. ”

“ Although, during the later ages of the human career, the higher truths taught by an earlier race were lost, still a slight hint of the beauty and purity of the more ancient worship may be traced through most of the ages of the history of religion. ”

“ The more I travel, see, and learn, the more I perceive that all the ancient religions, show that but one has existed from the Creation, for every faith tells the same tale as ours, with different actors under different names, but all the facts are the same. ”

“ Books rapidly coming into use in the Roman, Greek and Anglican communions as the text-books which represent the prophesied restoration of the Ancient Esoteric doctrine which, by interpreting the mysteries of religion, should reconcile faith and reason, religion and science, and accomplish the downfall of that sacerdotal system, which—"making the word of God of none effect by its traditions"—has hitherto usurped the name and perverted the truth of Christianity. ”

“ When we first have any account of the ancient Greek religion, we learn that they followed a kind of idolatrous worship of many gods, each supposed to control a different branch of human destiny and endowed with varying attributes and powers. ”

“ But we may remember in the first place that even then, especially in the household and in the country, the old religion had probably a much firmer hold than one might imagine from literary evidence, in the second that national character is not the growth of a day, so that we may safely refer permanent characteristics to the period when the old religion held its own. ”

“ Religion in some form or other has always wielded a powerful influence upon the life and customs of primitive nations; one evidence—almost invariably the deities and the temples erected for their veneration represent the supreme efforts of the ancient artists and alone have withstood the weathering of ages. ”

“ The study of Comparative Religion has shown how nearly the primeval inhabitants of lands widely distant from each other were at one in the views they had come to entertain. Hymns, prayers, precepts, and traditions are found in the sacred books of the great religions of the East, and archaeologists have deciphered on ancient monuments, and traced in primitive religious rites, clear evidence of belief in the existence of the Divine. ”

“ But the whole system of their religion, the tendency of their public feasts and ceremonies, the essence of the Pagan theology, of which the poets were the only teachers and professors, the very example of the gods, whose violent passions, scandalous adventures, and abominable crimes, were celebrated in their hymns or odes, and proposed in some measure to the imitation, as well as adoration, of the people; these were certainly very unfit means to enlighten the minds of men, and to form them to virtue and morality. ”

“ Neither will any attempt be made to follow the development which the early religion underwent in later periods, when foreign elements were added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded the old tradition. ”

“ NO account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. ”

“ The present state of our knowledge does not warrant our holding any view regarding the nature of primeval religion as established. The data which carry us farthest in our search for the historical origin of religion are undoubtedly the names expressive of the Divine which have been pre served in the most ancient languages. They show us how men conceived of the Divinity long before the erection of the oldest monuments or the inscription of the oldest records. ”

“ The saints whom she set up in the place of the old deities were certain to acquire the rank of gods in the estimation of the people and, despite the niceties of ecclesiastical doctrine, to become in fact objects of frank and open worship. ”

“ Yet it may be doubted whether the clouds have rolled completely away, and it is fairly certain that the many learned and able Catholic priests who have done so much to elucidate the origins and tendencies of ancient religions other than their own have until lately avoided the discussion of their relations with the earliest forms of Christianity. ”

“ Gibbon's Rome, vol. iii. p. 556. Inman's Ancient Faiths, vol. ii. p. 886. Taylor's Diegesis and Reber's Christ of Paul.)
[368:2] That is, the true faith.
[368:3] Dogma Deity Jesus Christ, p. 95.
[369:1] "The notion of a Triad of Supreme Powers is indeed common to most ancient religions." (Prichard's Egyptian Mytho., p. 285.)
"Nearly all the Pagan nations of antiquity, in their various theological systems, acknowledged a trinity in the divine nature." (Maurice: Indian Antiquities, vol. vi. p. 35.)
"The ancients imagined that their triad of gods or persons, only constituted one god." ”

“ The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it—and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived. ”

“ But we have sufficient evidence of another point of view which is that of more primitive religion, from which the deity is imagined as essentially immanent in the thing, not as a distinct personality emerging and separable from it. ”

“ Would the poets or prose writers of modern times, who praise, in harmonious numbers or well-turned periods, the religion of their country, welcome that religion if she were to disengage herself from the attractions of the mitre, and the associations of sacred altars and antique buildings, and rise up before them in the simplicity of her attire, and, with an authoritative voice, as when she first despoiled Greece and Rome of their elegant mythology, demanding from them repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ? ”

“ There are religions in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome. ”

“ The truth is that the religion of the ancients, as far as it can be collected from their writings, partook in no small degree of predestination. Yet it is enveloped in so much obscurity, that it is very difficult for us—nay, it might have been very difficult for them—to define where the supremacy of fate should stop and the authority of the gods commence. ”

“ The fondness of both Greek and Roman writers for identifying their own rites and mythology with those of less civilised or imperfectly known countries throws much obscurity on the history of religion generally. ”

“ From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone, among the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern world trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the religion of the Old Testament as 'revealed' in contrast with all other pre-Christian religions. ”

“ You, sir, will surely admit, that the faith of the ancients was far superior to modern traditionary faith, and was attended with a power which this latter faith cannot, in its very nature, ever attain to. By the ancient faith, or faith of immediate revelation, men wrought righteousness, subdued kingdoms, stopped the mouths of lions, and quenched the violence of fire—stayed the sun in the firmament—sealed up the heavens as brass for the space of three years and a half, or opened the windows thereof for the rain to descend in showers or torrents, even to a universal deluge. ”

“ We have seen how a new religious sense arose which turned men’s thoughts toward the next world and future happiness. This happiness the Orphics and Pythagoreans endeavored to secure by a prescribed mode of life, by ceremonial purifications, and by sacraments. The Mysteries likewise offered assurance through initiation and participation in their sacred ritual. In every case the devotees were inspired with confident hope, not by reason, but by ceremonies and emotional experiences. Philosophy was not yet united with religion. ”

“ In the East, gods descended from heaven, and were made incarnate in men; in the West, men ascended from earth, and took their seat among the gods. It was not the importation of Greek skepticism that made Rome skeptical. The excesses of religion itself sapped the foundations of faith. ”

“ As regards the adjacent religions, the idea that a mortal might enter into this mode of communion with the divinity was probably an ancient heritage of the Phrygian religions, for it crops up in various forms. ”

“ The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, which literature consequently—after having been purified, and as it were baptized—has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, I say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and conscience, the tradition of a society of which God was Himself the founder. ”

“ The religious affinities discoverable between the earlier and later “Mediterranean” systems may be classified according as they appear in the legends, in nomenclature and terminology, in external symbols and liturgical objects, in hieratic institutions, and finally in the ideas, aspirations, and concepts of faith. As regards legend and mythology, a great historic religion may of course claim to be free from all mythology ”