Forlong - Rivers of Life

Sun Worship.
bury, in what she calls consecrated ground, and in the tomb of his wife, the body of
one of her own sons, because he belongs to a Library in which he had permitted,
without protest, certain volumes which the church in her vigilance had placed upon
her Index Expurgatorius, and which she dreaded might prove destructive of her power
and authority. If literature aided Christianity, and wise men rejoiced amidst the
treasures of the Alexandrian Library, yet none the less did her priestly guardians soon
wake up to a full comprehension of the dangers which this new force threatened. To be
forewarned is to be forearmed, and the new faith diabolically led the way in a course
which, as a Cburch, she has rarely deviated from, of destroying all literature, save such
as did not infringe upon or criticise her own inanities. In 391 those who had burned
Serapis and ereeted another idol temple on his foundations, avenged themselves on all
mankind by burning down the first Alexandrian Library; and a thousand years after
that event, their consistent successors were able to assert with pious joy—from a once
Imperial throne, which mentally down-trodden Europe had allowed them to set up—that
Rome possessed scarcely a book but Missals. 1 Literature had then indeed reason to
rejoice that a decree of heaven went forth driving her out of Africa, as well as Asia and
Spain, although she had initiated a movement wbich led the Saracen in 640 to follow her
infamous example, and again burn an Alexandrian Library, and in 850 possibly also the
Basilican one of Constantinople. With empire, however, the Islámis recovered their
self-possession, and in Cordova, Bagdad, Alexandria and elsewhere, tried to atone for
the past, in which they very largely succeeded, as I shall show in my chapter on
Mahomedanism. At the sack of Constantinople, in 1452, we again lost an enormous
amount of literature. Some 120,000 Greek manuscripts were then known to have
perished, though the hatred and pious zeal of Christian Priests and Monks had injured or
interpolated many of these. It was then the Custom of the clerical order to sell what
they called “profane” literature as waste paper to “book binders and racket-makers” !
and many monks and priests used to spend their worthless lives with professional calligraphists,
“obliterating the writings by chemical preparations. . . . In this way thousands
of valuable MSS. have been lost. . . . . . . Popes and clergy waged war on historians
and poets.” Fortunately some eminent men busied themselves deciphering the
old writing under the new, and Greek dramas and Latin orations of “noble Pagans”
were recovered under trumpery poems or theological nonsense. In this way was won
back much of Plautus and Terence, a work of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and eight
hundred lines of a very ancient Iliad. 2
The Roman world early accepted Serapis as the best development of religion which
had arisen on the ruins of the Greek oracular shrines. Serapis also was but the outcome
of the worship of Mithras, which first appeared as a distinct creed at the seats of
Roman Empire after the conquest of Pontus by Pompey. It soon superseded the Hellenic
and Italian gods, and during the second and third centuries of the Empire, Serapis and
1 “In 1400 there was scarcely a book in Rome but Missals.”—Mill of Facts, p. 635.
2 Ibid., p. 635.
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