Problems of Religion; An Introductory Survey (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II GREEK AND ROMAN RELIGION The peoples of Christendom for a long time treated all the non-Christian religions as simply " heathen " and therefore unworthy of anything but disproof and contempt. Later, a few came to investigate with some curiosity and tolerance their queer customs and outlandish names. Only recently have they sought to look at them from the inside, to get at what they meant to those who believed and practised them, and see if there be not in them some inspiration for us too, some lesson which we can incorporate into our own faith and practice. It is in this friendlier and more sympathetic spirit that we would approach them.1 As our space is limited, we can only touch upon one or two of the many forms which religion assumed as the race became civilized; and then, in somewhat greater detail, we will recount the history of the Hebrew-Christian religion,which has become, through a dramatic series of events, the dominant faith of the world. But we must not fail to speak of that beautiful Hellenic religion which, though utterly vanished from the earth in its literal acceptation, has fur nished and still furnishes such inspiration for art, for literature, and for life, that it is fitly called " the mother-tongue of the imagination." l 1 This spirit was well expressed by an old and little-known writer, Maximus of Tyre: "God himself ... is unnamable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend his essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures . . . yearning for the knowledge of Him . . . like earthly lovers, [who are] happy in the sight of anything that wakens the memory of the beloved. . . . If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying w...