The Rev. Dr. R. Heber Newton, in an article which appeared in the North American Review, says: “There is, in fact, as we now see, nothing in the externals of the Christian church which is not a survival from the churches of paganism.... The sacramental use of water and bread and wine, the very sign of the cross—all are ancient human institutions, rites and symbols. Scratch a Christian and you come upon a Pagan. Christianity is a rebaptized paganism.” “Christendom,” says Dr. Lyman Abbott, “is only an imperfectly Christianized paganism.”
The creeds of old are dead or dying, and the celestial kings, who seemed so real to their worshipers, are mostly crownless phantoms now. Buddha, Laou-tsze, and Confucius, the wise men of the East, command the reverence of nearly half the world, and the Persian prophet has a few followers; but from these faiths the supernatural is vanishing. Millions yet believe that Krishna, the Christ of India, is the son of God; but this faith, too, is waning. The intellectual offspring of Plato’s brilliant brain survive, but all that remains of his divine father is a mutilated effigy. The genial Sun still warms and lights the earth, but centuries have flown since Mithra, his beloved, received the adoration of mankind. The fire still glows upon the hearth, but the great Titan who brought it down from Heaven lives only in a poet’s dream. The crimson nectar of the vine moves men to mirth and madness now as when the swan of Teos sang its praise, but Bacchus and the ancient mysteries are dead. Above storm-wrapped Olympus, as of old, is heard the thunder’s awful peal, but it is not the voice of Zeus. The voice of this, the mightiest of all the gods, is hushed forever. The populous and ever-growing empire of the dead still flourishes, but in its solemn court Osiris no longer sits as judge. The mother, as of yore, presses to her loving heart her dimpled babe and fondly gazes into its azure eyes to woo its artless smile; but Egypt’s star-crowned virgin and her royal child, who once received the homage of a world, are now but mythic dust. Manly beauty thrills our daughters’ hearts with love’s strange ecstasy, and the feigned suffering of the dying hero on the mimic stage moistens their eyes with tears; but Adonis sleeps in his Phoenician tomb, his slumbers undisturbed by woman’s sobs. The purple flower, substance of his dear self, which Venus carried in her bosom, withered long ago. When, at eve, the summer shower bathes with its cooling drops the verdure of the fields, across the sun-kissed cloud which veils the Orient sky may still be seen the gorgeous bridge of Bifrost; but over its majestic arch the dauntless Odin rides no more.
“The fair humanities of old religions,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”
—Schiller.
What has been the fate of the Pagan gods will be the fate of the Christian deity. Christianity, which supplanted the ancient faiths, will, in turn, be supplanted by other religions. On two continents already the cross has gone down before the crescent. The belief in Christ as a divine being is passing away. The creeds, as of old, affirm his divinity, but in the minds of his more enlightened followers the divine elements are disappearing. What was formerly believed to be supernatural is now known to be natural. What were once living verities are now dead formalities. Slowly and painfully, but surely and clearly, men are becoming convinced that there are no divine beings and no supernatural religions—that all the gods, including Christ, are myths, and all the religions, including Christianity, human productions. In the words of Jules Soury, “Time, which condenses nebulae, lights up suns, brings life and thought upon planets theretofore steeped in death, and gives back ephemeral worlds to dissolution and the fertile chaos of the everlasting universe—time knows nought of gods nor of the dim and fallacious hopes of ignorant mortals.”