Note 3 — Chapter IV · THE GRAVE SUSPICIONS AROUSED BY THE STUDY OF ANCIENT BELIEFS

It will be as well, in the first place, to see exactly what the Church herself now says on the matter; how far she recognises that gigantic strides have been made in a study formerly pursued in a manner necessarily elementary by the Alexandrian schools; how far she concedes the conclusions of the modern ethnologist; and how far she approves of progressive revelation as the explanation for the whole enigma of the parallels between ancient beliefs and our own. For this purpose I think I cannot do better than quote from two striking articles on the subject in the Church Times. They were contributed by the editor of The Treasury magazine. “The study,” he says, “of folk-lore, of anthropology, of primitive myth and ritual, has made enormous strides within the last quarter of a century, and the fruits of that study are now forced, for the first time,3 upon the attention of the general public. Presented in outline, the situation is as follows: We have been accustomed to consider Christianity apart from all other religions. We have recognised, indeed, the historical preparation for it so far as that is described in the pages of the Old Testament; but we have thought of that preparation as conducted among a single people, and by means of a unique revelation. Of pagan religions we have known practically nothing. The mythology of the Greeks and Romans, which some of us had to learn at school, seemed to be a collection of pointless fairy tales. And as regards other and more primitive races, both ancient and modern, the statement that ‘the heathen, in his blindness, bows down to wood and stone’ comprised accurately the sum of our knowledge. That there could be any but the vaguest likeness between them and our own beliefs was unimaginable. Possibly there was a belief in the Fatherhood of some supreme being, some vague conception of a future life; while sacrificial rites, as we knew, were not peculiar to the Jews. But the other doctrines of our Creed we regarded as exclusively our own. The ideas of a Triune God-head, of an Incarnate Saviour, of the Virgin Birth, of the Second Advent, of the Sacraments, of the Communion of Saints—these seemed to be the distinctive possessions of Christianity; these were marks clearly dividing it from any form of paganism. So, at least, we imagined. [Had we not every reason thus to imagine on the authority of Holy Scripture?] But it proves that we were completely mistaken. The modern study of primitive religion shows that every one of these beliefs is, or has been, held in some part or other of the pagan world quite independently of Christian influence, and that, while we are bound to speak of these beliefs as, in a sense, distinctly Christian, to term them exclusively Christian is no longer possible.... In these early mythologies we can discern the longing for a personal God, capable of direct communication with man, and for some sort of union between the divine and human natures. Whence did these instincts themselves originate? The one tenable reply seems to be that they were God-implanted.... The Zoroastrian anticipates the advent of a ‘Saviour’ (Saoshyas), who will end the strife between good and evil, personified as Ormuzd and Ahriman, by sweeping away evil from the earth. In the ancient Vedic and Scandinavian religions, in the Old-World creeds of Egypt and Babylon, in the legends of Mexico and Polynesia, is found, in a variety of guises, the same fundamental idea. Always there is a sense of a supremely righteous Power; of a world tainted with evil, and out of harmony with the Power above it; of the coming of some Deliverer, who will establish a kingdom of righteousness. Once more, in many mythologies the idea of a Virgin Birth is associated with that of a Divine Incarnation. Men felt instinctively that the entrance of a Divine Being into the human race must take place in a miraculous way. And thus the Spirit of God, working by means of what we may term the instinctive feelings of mankind, prepared the human race throughout the world for the coming of the Son of God, to be born of a pure Virgin, to take our nature upon Him for evermore, and to redeem us from the power of sin.... We find conceptions, such as that of the Hindu Trimurti, which seem to remember the doctrine of the Trinity. In the sacramental meals of totem-worship, when a sacred animal is killed, and partaken of by the worshippers in order that its power may be communicated to them [not to mention “sacred” men killed with the same idea], there seems a dim anticipation of the highest Christian rite. Baptism as a cleansing and symbolical ceremony was known centuries before the Christian era.... These rites and beliefs, obscured by superstition and insufficient to satisfy the longing which brought them into existence, were designed to serve as the schoolmasters who would lead the heathen at length to Christ” (cf. Galatians iii. 24).