Ancient faiths and modern : a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era : showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist / by Thomas Inman.

  • Thomas Inman
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ancient faiths and modern : a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era : showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist / by Thomas Inman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    to please Hiin, He is a fearful demon to all wlio are said to oppose Him. How can any reasonable man hold the opinion that the Devil instigated all atrocities of the Syrians, Chaldees, Assy- rians, Eomans, Turks, Tartars, Saracens, Affghans, ]\Iaho- metans, and Hindoos, and believe that the good God drowned the whole world, and nearly every single thing that had life; that He ordered the extermination, not only of Midi- anites and Amalekites, but slaughtered, in one way or another, all the people whom he led out of Egypt—except two—merely because they had a natural fear of war. V^Hiat was the massacre at Cawnpore to that in Jericho and other Canaanite cities ? I say it with sober seriousness—in sorrow, not in anger—as a thinking man, and not as an advocate for, or against, any religious view, that it is an awful thing for any nation to permit a book to circidate, as a sacred one, in which God and the Devil are painted in the same colours. Into this analysis of religion I was led to enter from the observation of a friend, who challenged me to find, in any non-Hebraic or non-Christian country, a faith or practice equal to that current amongst the followers of Moses and Jesus, or to discover any spot in the wide world where there is, or has been, a civilization equal to that which existed in Judea, and the parts inhabited by Christians. In consequence of this defiance, it became more than ever necessary for me to study the nature of the current faith and practice of Christendom, and to inquire how far the latter was dependent upon the former—that is to say, whether the practices of civilization are due to our religion, or have gradually grown up in spite of it. The next point was to pay similar heed to the doc- trines and manner of life common amongst those to whom our r.ible has been wholly unknown. Many of the conclusions to which I came liave already appeared in the second volume of Ancient Faiths, under
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