LIBERALITY AND SAMENESS OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS
The same liberal and humane spirit still prevails among those nations whose religion is founded on the same principles. “The Siamese,” says a traveller of the seventeenth century, “shun disputes and believe that almost all religions are good” (“Journal du Voyage de Siam”). When the ambassador of Louis XIV asked their king, in his master’s name, to embrace Christianity, he replied, “that it was strange that the king of France should interest himself so much in an affair which concerns only God, whilst He, whom it did concern, seemed to leave it wholly to our discretion. Had it been agreeable to the Creator that all nations should have had the same form of worship, would it not have been as easy to His omnipotence to have created all men with the same sentiments and dispositions, and to have inspired them with the same notions of the True Religion, as to endow them with such different tempers and inclinations? Ought they not rather to believe that the true God has as much pleasure in being honoured by a variety of forms and ceremonies, as in being praised and glorified by a number of different creatures? Or why should that beauty and variety, so admirable in the natural order of things, be less admirable or less worthy of the wisdom of God in the supernatural?”
The Hindus profess exactly the same opinion. “They would readily admit the truth of the Gospel,” says a very learned writer long resident among them, “but they contend that it is perfectly consistent with their Shastras. The Deity, they say, has appeared innumerable times in many parts of this world and in all worlds, for the salvation of his creatures; and we adore, they say, the same God, to whom our several worships, though different in form, are equally acceptable if they be sincere in substance.”
The Chinese sacrifice to the spirits of the air, the mountains and the rivers; while the Emperor himself sacrifices to the sovereign Lord of Heaven, to whom all these spirits are subordinate, and from whom they are derived. The sectaries of Fohi have, indeed, surcharged this primitive elementary worship with some of the allegorical fables of their neighbours; but still as their creed—like that of the Greeks and Romans—remains undefined, it admits of no dogmatical theology, and of course no persecution for opinion. Obscure and sanguinary rites have, indeed, been wisely prescribed on many occasions; but still as actions and not as opinions. Atheism is said to have been punished with death at Athens; but nevertheless it may be reasonably doubted whether the atheism, against which the citizens of that republic expressed such fury, consisted in a denial of the existence of the gods; for Diagoras, who was obliged to fly for this crime, was accused of revealing and calumniating the doctrines taught in the Mysteries; and from the opinions ascribed to Socrates, there is reason to believe that his offence was of the same kind, though he had not been initiated.
These were the only two martyrs to religion among the ancient Greeks, such as were punished for actively violating or insulting the Mysteries, the only part of their worship which seems to have possessed any vitality; for as to the popular deities, they were publicly ridiculed and censured with impunity by those who dared not utter a word against the populace that worshipped them; and as to the forms and ceremonies of devotion, they were held to be no otherwise important, then as they were constituted a part of civil government of the state; the Pythian priestess having pronounced from the tripod, that whoever performed the rites of his religion according to the laws of his country, performed them in a manner pleasing to the Deity. Hence the Romans made no alterations in the religious institutions of any of the conquered countries; but allowed the inhabitants to be as absurd and extravagant as they pleased, and to enforce their absurdities and extravagances wherever they had any pre-existing laws in their favour. An Egyptian magistrate would put one of his fellow-subjects to death for killing a cat or a monkey; and though the religious fanaticism of the Jews was too sanguinary and too violent to be left entirely free from restraint, a chief of the synagogue could order anyone of his congregation to be whipped for neglecting or violating any part of the Mosaic Ritual.
The principle underlying the system of emanations was, that all things were of one substance, from which they were fashioned and into which they were again dissolved, by the operation of one plastic spirit universally diffused and expanded. The polytheist of ancient Greece and Rome candidly thought, like the modern Hindu, that all rites of worship and forms of devotion were directed to the same end, though in different modes and through different channels. “Even they who worship other gods,” says Krishna, the incarnate Deity, in an ancient Indian poem (Bhagavat-Gita), “worship me although they know it not.”—Payne Knight.
THE END.