The learned author overlooks in his argument that cows were sacrificed and worshipped in India before they were transferred to the Zodiac and to the symbolism of the elements.[35]
“Religion, at its base, is the product of imagination working on early man’s wants and fears, and is in no sense supernatural or the result of any preconceived and deliberate thought or desire to work out a system of morals. It arose in each case from what appeared to be the pressing needs of the day or season on the man or his tribe. The codification and expansion of faiths would then be merely the slow outcome of the cogitations and teachings of reflective minds, working usually with a refining tendency on the aforesaid primitive Nature-worship, and in elucidation of its ideas, symbolism, and legends. Early rude worshippers could not grasp abstractions, nor follow sermons even if they had been preached, and certainly not recondite theories on what the West designates ‘Solar,’ and other theories.”—(“Rivers of Life,” Forlong, vol. i. p. 36.)
“In the Shapast la Shayast (Sacred Books of the East, vol. v. part I.) much stress is laid on bull’s urine as a purifier.”—(Personal letter from Professor R. A. Oakes, Watertown, New York, April 20, 1888.)
“During the last few years we have been treated to a great deal of foolish gush about the beauty and nobility of Eastern religions. I don’t deny that there are many commendable features about them, and that they often get near to the heart of true religion, as we understand it. But in their practical results they cannot be compared with Christianity. Take a concrete instance:—
“The Rev. T. W. Jex-Blake has this to say about Benares, with its three thousand Hindu temples: ‘Step into the city,’ he says; ‘one temple swarms with fœtid apes; another is stercorous with cows. The stench in the passages leading to the temples is frightful; the filth beneath your feet is such that the keenest traveller would hardly care to face it twice. Everywhere, in the temples, in the little shrines in the street, the emblem of the Creator is phallic. Round one most picturesque temple, built apparently long since British occupation began, probably since the battle of Waterloo, runs an external frieze, about ten feet from the ground, too gross for the pen to describe,—scenes of vice, natural and unnatural, visible to all the world all day long, worse than anything in the Lupanar in Pompeii. Nothing that I saw in India roused me more to a sense of the need of religious renovation by the Gospel of Christ than what met the eye openly, right and left, at Benares.” (“Tribune,” New York, Nov. 11, 1888.)
“Forty years ago, during a stay of three months in Bombay, I saw frequently cows wandering in the streets, and Hindu devotees bowing, and lifting up the tails of the cows, rubbing the wombs of the aforesaid with the right hand, and afterwards rubbing their own faces with it.”—(Personal letter from Captain Henri Jouan, French Navy, dated Cherbourg, France, July 29, 1888.)
Almost identical information was communicated by General J. J. Dana, U. S. Army, who, in the neighborhood of Calcutta, over forty years ago, had seen Hindu devotees besmeared from head to foot with human excrement.
Among the superstitious practices of the Greeks, Plutarch mentions “rolling themselves in dung-hills.” (“Morals,” Goodwin’s trans., Boston, 1870, vol. i. p. 171, art. “Superstitions.”) Plutarch also mentions “foul expiations,” “vile methods of purgation,” “bemirings at the temple,” and speaks of “penitents wrapped up in foul and nasty rags,” or “rolling naked in the mire,” “vile and abject adorations,”—(pp. 171-180.)