Lectures on the Progress of Civilization and Government, and Other Subjects (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851. Excerpt: ... Rousseau and Volney represent man, says Dr. Wiseman, as the "mutum et turpe pecus" of the ancients, thrown, according to the words of the latter, as it were, by chance, on a confused and savage land--an orphan abandoned by the unknown hand that had produced him, and left to discover the first elements of social life, the first rudiments of civilization and government Even the religious teacher has caught the popular fallacy, and asserts it to be a law of humanity, that the physical always precedes the moral. From the venerable retreats of Yale is heard the following language from one who professes to be a teacher of Christianity, who has been honored with the degree of a Doctor of Sacred Theology: "Religion is physical in its first tendencies, a thing of outward doing--a lamb burned on on an altar of turf, and rolling up its smoke into the heavens--a gorgeous priesthood--a temple covered with a kingdom's gold, and shining afar in barbaric splendor. Well is it if the sun and stars of heaven do not look down upon a nation of prostrate worshipers. "Nay, it is well if the hands do not fashion their own god, and bake them into consistency in fires of their own kindling. But in later ages, God is a Spirit--religion takes a character of intellectual simplicity and enthrones itself on the summits of reason. It is now wholly Spiritual--a power in the Soul." This is a somewhat startling proposition, in whatever gorgeous language it may be clothed, and teaches, if it teaches any thing, that Christianity itself is evolved by the progress of man, who at first is an idolater, adoring the host of heaven, and bowing down in temples covered with gold, to the images his own hands have made, and worshiping in his infancy and necessary ignorance, the material and physical, w...