Forlong - Rivers of Life

RIVERS OF LIFE:
OR,
THE SOURCES AND STREAMS OF THE FAITHS OF MAN
IN ALL LANDS
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CHAPTER I.
IN introducing to the public the accompanying chart of the Religions of the world, I
do so simply with a desire to help those who have not yet studied these subjects, or
who may not have had such good opportunities as have fallen to my lot of seeing the
Faiths and Rituals I purpose depicting, in full practical development and progress.
Neither the chart nor what I write is for the instruction of the learned in ancient
Faiths and languages; from them I look for correction and further light than I have
yet attained to; but imperfect as all knowledge here is, it would vastly tend to progress
and enlightenment, if we all wrote and published what facts we know; or as
Max Müller puts it, throw abroad the chips from our various workshops.
If the matters of Man’s early and present Faiths are difficult, they are of allenthralling
interest; and for my own part, all the leisure moments of a busy life have
been more or less devoted for the last thirty years to studying them and cognate subjects;
or, perhaps, I should rather say, to watching and noting down the valuable
freight, which ever sweeps, in a strong, full, and deep current, past all who study
the literature of their time. Sometimes we see this stream of religious and literary
thought calm, but oftener far, troubled, if not tempestuous; sometimes the floating
craft is the compact and fully garnished vessel of the man of calm reason and high
intellectual culture, but oftener do we note upon the stream, the crank and leaky
barque of the bigot, the zealot, or the religious enthusiast. The earnest student must
fish in many waters, and in all he may catch something. I am still a searcher for
pebbles on the shores of the streams of Faiths, and moments snatched, few and often
far between, from an anxious professional life, are not favourable to a subject like mine;
the threads are delicate as they are numerous, and as it were mere lines of thought,
which here and there only attain to a rich maturity; but which , in every age and clime,
will be found twining out and in with each other in endless maze. As a rule the
whole tangled web of a Faith springs from a grand spiritual idea of a devout Leader,
which, worked upon by various minds, commonly bursts out later into a practical