Forlong - Rivers of Life

Introductory Chapter.
bolts, as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade nature to the
level of primitive Judaism.” 1 “Religion,” he also elsewhere writes, “arising like all other
knowledge out of the action and interaction of man’s mind, has taken the intellectual
coverings of Fetishism, Polytheism, of Theism or Atheism, of Superstition or Rationalism;
and if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the
theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past, not because
it has renounced idols of Woods and idols of Stone, but begins to see the necessity of
breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions and fine spun ecclesiastical
cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man’s emotions, by worship
‘for the most part of the silent sort’ at the altar of the unknown and unknowable.
. . . . If a man asks me, what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I
reply that I know not, that neither I nor any one else have any means of knowing,
and that under these circumstances I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all,
I do not think he has any right to call me a sceptic.” 2 Again, “what are among
the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They
are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to
a readiness to believe, that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin,
and there are many excellent persons who still hold by these principles;” . . . . . “Yet
we have no reason to believe that it is the improvement of our faith, nor that of our
morals which keeps the plague from our city; but it is the improvement of our natural
knowledge. We have learned that pestilences will only take up their abode among
those who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them. Their cities
must have narrow, unwatered streets full of accumulated garbage, their houses must be
ill-drained, ill-ventilated; their subjects must be ill-lighted, ill-washed, ill-fed, illclothed;
the London of 1665 was such a city; the cities of the east, where plague has
an enduring dwelling, are such cites; we in later times have learned somewhat of
nature, and partly obey her. Because of this partial improvement of our natural
knowledge, and of that fractional obedience, we have no plague; but because that knowledge
is very imperfect, and that obedience yet incomplete, typhus is our companion
and cholera our visitor.” Former generations, and indeed many among us still say, it
is the hand of God, let us humble ourselves before his awful judgements, let us
have days for prayer and fasting; all this is ignorance and superstition which we are
getting ashamed of. But to return to Bibliolatry or the worship of sacred books and
prophets.
In my Chart I have denoted this vast phase of faith by a blue band. It will be
seen in every stream, commencing with reverence for the Vedas. The books are
shut to the people till the days of printing, when I show one open Bible. I will here
give the dates of these sacred books in the order of the Chart, that is, chronologically,
according to the best writers of the present day.
1 [T.H. Huxley “The Origin of Species” (a review of Darwin’s book; 1860). — T.S.]
2 [Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866; reprinted in vol I of
Huxley’s collected essays). The two quotations following are from the same essay. — T.S.]
13