Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
founder our error. These objects are the keys that can alone unlock the Eleusinian
casket, therefore we must study faiths practically, and go, see, and handle the actual
symbols called I’s, A’s, and O’s, &c., and so learn from what they symbolise, the
foundations on which ancient peoples built up the mighty structures we call Faiths. It
is all very well to be presented with our Christ as a babe in a cave or manger, but we
want to become acquainted with types in general—Suns and Caves as well as this
Anointed One, the Dove. aud the Cloud, or Elohe, even before these three appeared over
the waters of Jordan; and many existing faiths help us to interpret such forms and
ideas.
Sir John Lubbock, in his long chapter on Religion, in the Origin of Civilisation,
devotes but a few words to the worship of Ancestors, calling it an Idolatry which survived
the stage of Totemism (p. 232), and belonging to living man-worship, but it is
very transient even when the family niche is crowded with little rude symbols of those
who once sat at the sacred hearth. Though the widow and immediate offspring never
forget these before or during meals, “yet in ordinary cases this semi-worship only lasts a
few years;” 1 for no real gods, temples, bibles, or priests are here, and the living circle
who knew the dead is ever being reduced, and time removing the heritage further from
view into the dim past. The case is a little different when the dead have been great
and wonderful men who have not only formed a tribe into a city, and a city into a
nation, but transformed these into an empire; how few, however, are such, and even
then how transitory is the worship of a Romulus.
1 Erman, quoted by Lubbock, O. of Civil., p. 230.