The only religion that ever became the inspiration of a whole people, so far as history records, was that of Christna, with the teeming millions of India. Buddhism was driven out of India by the powerful and unscrupulous Brahmans, and took refuge in Ceylon, Thibet, and adjacent provinces.
The religion of Jesus met a similar fate from the Jews and the Roman governors, until Pagan Rome adapted and transformed it on the principle of dominance and exploitation inherent in the genius of the Latin Race.
Since which time no one will pretend to claim that the Religion of Jesus has ever dominated the human race or any large part of it.
Rome to-day no more represents the religion of Jesus than the Brahmans of to-day represent that of Christna, or Buddha, or the religion of the Vedas.
Nothing is so amazing to-day as that the intelligence of the present age fails to recognize this fact.
All of these religions of the past have adapted their teaching to the multitude through parable and allegory. Nothing in literature can be found more beautiful and inspiring, and at the same time comprehensible to the commonest intelligence, than Christna’s “Parable of the Fisherman.”
Christna and Buddha, like Jesus, taught to their disciples a “Secret Doctrine,” apprehensible only to the few. “To you it is given to know the mysteries,” but to others, who are without, it is not given.
It can readily be proven from at least a half score of the early Church Fathers (see page 70 et seq. of the author’s “Mystic Masonry”), that the early church practiced “Initiation,” patterned after those of the Gnostics, Therapeutia and the Mysteries of Egypt, and divided their neophytes and postulants into three degrees, as in Blue Lodge Masonry to-day.
While the great mass of mankind to-day are incapable of apprehending these genuine mysteries of life, and of the individual soul of man, it is doubtful if any civilization ever existed where so many were willing and capable of understanding them as are found here in America to-day.
The reason for this and the growth of intelligence have already been outlined.