It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines..., relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution,--there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The resemblance between the two movements covers far more than the speed and extent of their conquests. It can be argued that in s...ome measure both are great Christian heresies. And like Communism, the Moslem faith in its relations with Europe has tended to follow the pattern of relentless pressure on all weak points and undefended frontiers and to advance its banners wherever there were found to be no defenders at the gate.... Islam derived its power to attract educated and intellectual groups from the use it made of ideas deeply congenial to the Oriental mind. Its rejection of the Greek and Christian heritage of humanism and incarnation in favor of a purely transcendent deity accorded well with the other-worldly tradition of Oriental religious thought. At the same time, the Moslem appeal to the people at large lay in the social evils which it promised to redress. Mohammedanism was in part a harking back to traditional intellectual and religious ideas, in part an outburst of social protest against an unjust and unstable social order. Modern Communism has something of the same character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Greeks have given to the world the science of history; the Israelites gave to the world historical religion. In contrast to al...l their neighbors, both peoples knew what history is; this is no consequence of their mental giftedness, however, for there is another reason. Through mighty events both peoples experienced what history is, and by the investment of their lives they made history. The peculiar mental capacity of each of the two peoples comes to the fore in the way in which they experience history and express it. For both peoples history was a source of present and future knowledge. Thucydides wrote his history because what happened would, according to human ways, surely happen again in the future in the same or a similar way. This was conceived in a genuinely Greek way, for history is an eternal repetition; nothing new happens under the sun. Even in the stream of eternally changing events the Greeks sought the unalterable, the regular occurrence. Thus they employed the same method with regard to history as with regard to nature because history was a piece of nature. For this reason their mental life can justifiably be called non-historical. If God is to be found, he must be sought in the unalterable, in mental being, in the Ideas. God revealed himself to the Israelites in history and not in Ideas; he revealed himself when he acted and created. His being was not learned through propositions but known in actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and lis...tened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this primitive people, brooded ov...er and harmonised by the energetic Greek imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers; welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man's experiences of a given object, or series of objects--all the hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas--of conceptions,... which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the house of the prudent countryman will be, of course, a place of honest manners; and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of... married life, the deity of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the founder of civilised order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--...Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »