Lecture I. Introduction. 5
document may have survived to us out of a long series, like
a single chapter out of a book, leading us to form a wholly
wrong idea of the author's meaning and the object of the work
he had written or compiled. We all know how dangerous it is to
explain a passage apart from its context, and to what erroneous
conclusions such a practice is likely to lead.
And yet it is with such broken and precarious materials that the
student of the religions of the past has to work. Classical antiquity
can give us but little help. In the literary age of Greece and Rome
the ancient religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into
their dotage, and the conceptions on which they were founded
had been transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was
little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or even a mere
caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of Assyria had
gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour Nebuchadrezzar had
reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into
the patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once
made and unmade the lords of the East, had become“Chaldæan”
fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia were
remembered only for their connection with astrology. The old
tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but
even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was
more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though
the Ptolemies and early Roman emperors rebuilt the temples on [003]
the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress
of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names
they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham,
a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which
all the spirit and life had fled.
Both in Egypt and in Babylonia, therefore, we are thrown back
upon the monumental texts which the excavator has recovered
from the soil, and the decipherer has pieced together with infinite
labour and patience. At every step we are brought face to face
with the imperfections of the record, and made aware how much