Note 25 — Chapter IX · CONCLUSION

It is not merely in regard to the study of Christian origins that sociological problems are vitiated by the habitual passing of à priori judgments on issues never critically considered. When an expert hierologist like Dr. Budge tells us repeatedly that in ancient Egypt a “highly spiritual,” “lofty spiritual” and “elevated” religion went hand in hand with a system of sorcery of “degrading” savagery,25 we are led to inquire how the estimates of altitude are reached or justified. There appears to be no answer save that Dr. Budge holds certain theories about the universe, and, finding these more or less akin to the esoteric theology of Egypt, laurels his own opinions in this fashion. But Dr. Budge is no more entitled than any one else to settle such questions without rational discussion, and the reason of some of us revolts at the concept of a conjoined sublimity and imbecility as a spurious paradox. It is but a convention of supernaturalist apriorism, figuring where it has no right of entry. In precisely the same fashion, Dr. Estlin Carpenter credits to the Aztecs a “lofty religious sentiment,” avowed to be “strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual.”26 The “lofty” is again a wreath for the writer’s own philosophy of religion, in terms of which the act of the “good Samaritan,” performed a million times by unpretending human beings, was imaginable only by a supernormal Jew, and unmatchable in pagan thought.