Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
the two Ds, Delosis and Delta, as usually put in ancient days, B C, or O. See Inman
for details (I. 187) of these two forms. The Jewish ark itself was only a larger charm,
fetish, or talisman, which brought good or bad luck prosperity or death and destruction,
to those who possessed it, nay, to those who even touched it. In all ages and
faiths, we have such fetishism starting up and running side by side with, but not I
consider forming a distinct stream of, one of man’s faiths.
It is with reluctance that I have even allowed into the stream of Faiths the
worship of Ancestors, as it is found in every Faith, and near its very source. As
naturally as the child loves and the man often adores his parents, so have nations
adored their ancestors, their tombs, and writings. As however we clearly follow up
this ancestral adoration, we find it go through all the usually phases of a Faith, viz. it
attaches miracles to its object, raises the parent into an idol, causes sacrifices and even
massacres and wars for the land or places where he lived, or which were loved by him;
and makes pilgrimages to his shrines, as the East and West exhibit daily. Travellers
on the Euphrates still find hundreds of Jews going to the Tomb of Ezra in ancient
Kaldea. Ancestral worship usually frames a Bible out of the revered ancestor’s
sayings or writings, as the Hebrew has in the case of Moses, and the Mahomedan
of those of his “Peers.” It is, then, because I find all these in Ancestral worship
that I include it is a stream of Faith, else would I class it as a sect or phase of a Faith,
or a partial heresy, and liken it to animal and fetish worship.
Bible or Book Fetishism, I am compelled to show as a prominent part of every
stream of Faith, from the days of the Vedas and Zendavesta to the present hour. I
shall also hereafter have much to say of reverence for, if not partial adoration of
animals, and fetishes, and of Demonology; meantime, I think what I have to say will
come better after I have devoted a little time to each of my six early and direct
sources of man’s Faiths.