Forlong - Rivers of Life

4
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Bernouf or a Saint Hilaire, nay, who think the exquisite and intensely interesting
lectures of Max Müller extremely heavy, and for many reasons to be avoided. Before
such persons I wish also to try and put plainly and in a brief and compact manner,
so much and no more of the writings, history, and nature of all Religions, as we at
present have data for, and are agreed concerning. In doing this, I do not mean to say
that there are not differences of opinions, but merely that science and research have
established or are establishing what I shall here treat of and have depicted in this
Chart. Even if I be not right in all I urge, I shall have forwarded a very important
matter, by pointing out and illustrating many analogies in rites, customs, language,
and ideas, which others who have here so oft stumbled at the very threshold, may
be better able to follow up than I am; for the tangled skein has never yet, that I
have observed, given fully forth its ends to those who in Europe have sought to unravel
it, and who, if but once they picked up the ends, could abundantly have led the way.
Knowledge, says some one, is in the abstract but the reminiscence or recovery of ideas,
and I hope to point out in this volume many a forgotten form and idea.
Writing as I do from the cradles of our race, where religious fanaticism and
intolerance still flourish in all their strongest archaic rudeness, I may unwittingly be
doing what others have long ago done better than I; it is necessary therefore that I
here state, that I have never come across an attempt like this, to show in a plain,
historical, and I hope popular way, the origin and streams of man’s Faiths as they
poured down from the great fountain-head, as the ancient Aryan would tell us, from
“The Great Father,”—the Brahm, the AUM, the Ormazd of the east, or as the Jewish
Genesis puts it, from the Elohim, or Ruach Elohim, upon the fertile but till then
uncultivated soul of his creatures.
I am the more induced to try, though at great risk of error, to render fixed at
least within some definite, though it may be wide limits, those rising, ebbing, flowing,
strong but sometimes ephemeral thoughts of ancient men regarding their Creator,
because we meet on every side, even amongst well educated and tolerably well read
persons, the most astonishing ignorance as to the very existence of the great religious
Leaders of our race, nay, even total ignorance of the very names of the great, and with
some allowance, of the grandest Faiths of man.
Max Müller opens one of his excellent Lectures (Chips, I. 182) with Paul’s text,
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good,” 1 and asks what number of theologians
or laymen have ever taken it to heart. “How many candidates for holy orders,” he
says, “could give a straightforward answer if asked to enumerate the principal religions
of the world, or to state the names of their founders and the titles of the works which
are still considered by millions of human beings as the sacred authorities for their religious
beliefs?” To study such works would be considered mere waste of time! Let
us hope that matters are mending since this was written, in 1867 or thereabouts.
There is no doubt that these subjects remain far too much stored in the granaries of
1 [I Thessalonians V. 22]