Forlong - Rivers of Life

2
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
violence which would have shamed and horrified Him whose name his followers have
perhaps adopted; whilst in their precepts, dogmas, and rituals, they differ as much from
the spiritual worship which that Leader taught and practiced, as frozen seas from
torrid zones, as the delicate tracery of a Phidias from the formless stones bedaubed
with red which all the ancient tribes around me worship; and which is yet but
a feature of that same Faith which the artistic Greek threw into the stones of Athens,
and which is also precisely that Faith which, as Ruskin puts it, reared “the stones of
Venice,”—which shines out no less in the obelisks of Egypt than in the columns, poles,
and hangings, which beautify the Piazza-di-san-Marco, and which we can everywhere
still trace throughout the world. It is then for the student of these things, who is
aided by the vast light which literature and philosophy are everywhere casting on his
path, to as keenly collect, as to severely sift, the ends and beginnings of the flossy mass,
divided and sub-divided as he will find these lines of thought to be, whether by the
subtle brains of ancient philosophies, devotees, and fanatics, or by the old poets and
painters of nature and art, who always follow these, and who work up the stiff, cold,
coarse outlines into glowing tints and lovely images.
As an instance of how closely we must watch for the traces of man’s Faiths in
his doings and sayings, I may note, that Mr. Fergusson, the great writer on architecture,
and the author and compiler of that beautiful volume on “Tree and Serpent
Worship,” says that, keen observer though he was of ancient architecture, he had
seen many of the beautiful temples and sculpturings he depicts, for a dozen of years
past (I quote from memory), and never observed the serpent or a trace of serpentworship,
although now that his attention has been called to it he finds it everywhere,
twining in and out, and over-shadowing with up-reared hood, the oldest ideas of man
on stone and rock.
The more we study Faiths the more shall we perceive the very close union of
their essences and origins. Thus a great tree first springs up and stands apart,
beautiful and noble by itself. The beasts of Earth and birds of Heaven come to it for
nourishment and shelter, but they bring with them the corruptions of many nations,
and the lovely branches of the tree get coated and encrusted with many parasites, some
good and lovely as itself, but many also poisoning and corrupting. The substance of
the great Tree is eaten into, and its mighty branches are disfigured and weighed down,
—all this it can bear; but at last a delicate, tiny, gentle creeper calls to it from the
ground for support, and taking it up fondly, the tree nestles it in its mighty arms and
feeds it with its own life, soon, alas, to find that it is to be repaid by the grasp of death
in the mighty and overtightening embrace of the many-folded destroyer. So sinks the
great Parent Faith into the Earth from which it sprang, and in its place rises the
tangled and mazy mass which we find all old Faiths to be.
Originally, then, all faiths are but the idea of a great man, or men great in faith
if not in intellect, and not at all necessarily so in culture; men to whom ideas are