Lecture I. Introduction. 7
If it is difficult to understand and describe with accuracy the
religions which are living in our midst, how much more difficult
must it be to understand and describe the religions that have
gone before them, even when the materials for doing so are at
hand! We are constantly told that the past history of the particular
forms of religion which we profess, has been misunderstood and
misconceived; that it is only now, for example, that the true
history of early Christianity is being discovered and written, or
that the motives and principles underlying the Reformation are
being rightly understood. The earlier phases in the history of a
religion soon become unintelligible to a later generation. If we
would understand them, we must have not only the materials in
which the record of them has been, as it were, embodied, but
also the seeing eye and the sympathetic mind which will enable
us to throw ourselves back into the past, to see the world as our
forefathers saw it, and to share for a time in their beliefs. Then [005]
and then only shall we be able to realise what the religion of
former generations actually meant, what was its inner essence as
well as its outer form.
When, instead of examining and describing a past phase in
the history of a still existing form of faith, we are called upon to
examine and describe a form of faith which has wholly passed
away, our task becomes infinitely greater. We have no longer the
principle of continuity and development to help us; it is a new
plant that we have to study, not the same plant in an earlier period
of its growth. The fundamental ideas which form, as it were, its
environment, are strange to us; the polytheism of Babylonia, or
the animal-worship of Egypt, transports us to a world of ideas
which stands wholly apart from that wherein we move. It is
difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of those who saw
no underlying unity in the universe, no single principle to which
it could all be referred, or who believed that the dumb animals
were incarnations of the divine. And yet, until we can do so, the
religions of the two great cultured nations of the ancient world,