Father Thébaud’s next chapter is devoted to a historical review of the primeval religion and its decline in Central Asia and Africa. And here the proof is more overwhelming, if possible, than in the case of India. As to the monotheism of the great Doctor—if we may give him such a title—of the ancient East, and of the Zends, there can be no manner of doubt. Nay, “even the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is clearly contained in the most authentic part of the Zend-Avesta.” There is also that august personage, apart from all superior beings under God, “who stands between God and man; shows the way to heaven, and pronounces judgment upon human actions after death; guards with his drawn sword the whole world against the demons; has his own light from inside, and from outside is decorated with stars.” Our author makes Zoroaster, at the latest, a contemporary of Moses, and justly observes that the Zend-Avesta “represents the thoughts of men very near the origin of our species.” Now, the magnificent eloquence and profound truth of the thoughts we meet, rivalling at times the Book of Job, the beauty of the prayers, and the elaborate splendor of the ritual, testify to a very different state of things in those earliest days from that alleged by the evolutionists. Father Thébaud decides the Zends to be Vedic, and not Persian. And no doubt in the remarkable form and construction of the poems—dramatic, and mostly in the form of dialogue—in the tone of thought and leading religious ideas, they closely resemble the Hindoo Vedas. But it is our impression that we do not find in the writings of Zoroaster that perpetual insistence on the necessity of absorption into the deity which characterizes the Hindoo poems—the Bhagavât-Gita, for example. It would appear that the Persians occupied a special place in the dispensation of God in the ancient world. The Holy Spirit, in the prophecies, speaks of “my servant Cyrus whom I have chosen,” and it is certain that the pure monotheistic worship was preserved longer in Persia than in any nation of antiquity, except the Jewish. Its corruption was into dualism, by which the spirit of evil, as in the Indian Trimourti, was invested with almost co-ordinate power with the spirit of good. But for full information on this important and interesting subject we must refer the reader to Father Thébaud himself.
Our limits do not admit of our giving scarcely the faintest outline of our author’s argument in proof of the monotheism of Pelasgic Greece, and its gradual degradation to a sensual and idolatrous anthropomorphism in Hellenic and Heroic Greece. The substantial genuineness of the Orphic literature he successfully establishes, as well as the similarity of its doctrines to those of the Vedas; from which he draws the obvious inference that the two came from the same source, and that that branch of the Aryan family carried with them to their more distant settlements traditions of the primitive revelation so conspicuous in the Persian and Hindoo mystic epics, but much defaced and distorted in the course of their long and toilsome migrations. If pure monotheism ever prevailed in Pelasgic Greece, its reign was short. Indeed, to Orpheus himself are ascribed pantheistic doctrines. It was the poets who ushered in that special form of idolatry which took possession of Greece, the worship of the human being deified with all his infirmities—the anthropomorphism of the gods, as Father Thébaud calls it. And the chief sinner, on this score, was Homer, the first and greatest of them all. Yet did that densely-populated, unseen world of the Greeks—that sensuous, nay vicious, idolatry—which peopled the ocean and the mountains and the forests with gods, and imagined a divinity for every fountain, and every grove, and every valley, and every rill, with its superior deities, up to the supreme father of Olympus, himself subject to that forlorn solution of the riddle of “evil”—fate—bear witness from Olympus, and from Hades, and from the realms of the sea, to the primitive revelation. It bore witness to a civilization from which that degradation of the ideas of God to the level of humanity, in spite of its artistic grace and poetic feeling, deformed, however, by a filthy lasciviousness, with its short period of literary splendor and of exalted philosophy, ending with the sophistical negations of scepticism, was a fall, and not a progress.
For all this, “the precious fragments of a primitive revelation are found,” as Father Thébaud truly observes, “scattered through the writings of nearly all ancient Greek and Latin philosophers and poets.” His two chapters on this subject—chapter vii. on “Hellenic Philosophy as a Channel of Tradition,” and chapter viii. on “The Greek and Latin Poets as Guardians of Truth”—are perhaps the most interesting part of his most interesting and instructive work. They embrace a subject which has always appeared to us as more worthy of learned labor than any other which could be named. That life would be well spent which should devote itself to collecting all these fragments of traditionary truth from all ante-Christian literatures. Such a work would not turn back the flood of rationalism, whose first risings we owe to Greece—for it is rather moral than intellectual—but it would materially obstruct it, and would rescue from it many souls which might otherwise be lured to their destruction by the feeble echoes of the sophists and Aristophanes, which, beginning with Voltaire, are now multiplying through all the rationalistic press of the world.
Meanwhile, we cordially commend Father Thébaud’s work on Gentilism to the attentive study of all who wish for solid information and sagacious criticism on a subject which appears to us, without wishing in the least to underrate scientific investigation, to be more interesting and more important than all or any of the discoveries of physical science. These, as has been proved of late years, may be turned against the truth, and become thus a means of darkening instead of enlightening the soul. At the best, be they correct or erroneous, great or small, many or few, they cannot add an inch to our stature or a day to our lives. They do not even add to our happiness.
But a false science—one which would assign to each of us an insignificant phenomenal existence, whose individuality will disappear, at the end of its few days of living consciousness, in an universal whole in an eternal state of progress—is as fatal to human happiness as anything can be short of the abyss of reprobation. More consoling, as it is more in accordance with right reason, is the testimony which comes to us trumpet-tongued, in one vast unison, from all the ages, that the history of the race is one of decadence, not of progress. The sentence passed was death. The road to death is decadence. The way is rounded; there is a movement onward and a growth of life until the descent begins which lands us in dissolution. But every moment from the first cry of infancy is a step nearer to death; we are every one of us dying every day; and a movement towards death is not progress. Individual experience joins its voice to that of universal history in testimony of this. The revelation of Christ has put us in possession of the highest and certain truth; it has given us a more exalted moral, and has recast our nature in a higher, nay, in a divine, mould. We are still dying every day; but the certain hope of a joyful resurrection has deprived death of its agonizing sting, and made it, like sleep, a source of happiness instead of despair. But this is nothing like the progress of which the sceptics prate. It is a supernatural stage in the dispensation of God for the renewal of his fallen creature, predetermined before all time. His own part in it—the natural order—is one long history of decadence. There has been the ebb and flow, the rising to fall, of all movement. But decadence has all along triumphed over progress. Amidst what a decadence are we now living from the promising progress of the middle ages! And we are bid to expect so terrific a retrogression before the consummation of all things, that “even the elect shall scarcely be saved.”
It is the witness of all the ages—human progress ebbing and flowing—but, on the whole, the flow does not overtake the ebb. The ocean of life has been ever ebbing into its eternal abysses, and will ebb, leaving behind it a dry and barren waste, until the morning of eternity shall break over the withdrawing night of time, chaos shall be for ever sealed in the confusion and sadness of its darkness, and the final word shall go forth, of which the sublime physical law was only a type and a shadow: “Let there be light!”
MADAME’S EXPERIMENT.
A SAINT AGNES’ EVE STORY.
“MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, NOR YOUR WAYS MY WAYS, SAITH THE LORD.”
Madame the Countess of Hohenstein stood at the window of the great hall of her palace, waiting for the coach which was to take her to a château some leagues distant, where she was to grace a grand entertainment, and to be kept for a whole night by her hosts as an especial treasure. For Madame the Countess of Hohenstein, spite of her sixty years and her three grown sons, was a famous beauty still and a brilliant conversationist, and few were her rivals, young or old, throughout the kingdom. But her face was clouded as she waited in her stately hall that January afternoon, and she listened with a pained expression to the sound of a footstep overhead pacing steadily up and down. She touched a bell presently.