Comparative Study of Religions

Extract

Let us follow the sun in its perpetual rising, as it passes over the earth's scarred surface, crossing illimitable oceans, continents, deserts, and towering mountain ranges, and the eternal snows—silent, glistening, old.

It lights up, with its dawn, the dawn of the world—the superposed strata of archaic cultures, one upon another in an unfolding phantasy, of prolific confusion, yet a crumbling order, proclaiming an ordered growth in the buried millennia of the world’s childhood. It tells us things we had never grasped as a whole, till we came to this preparatory contemplative vision (preparatory to all real thought), or, perhaps, which we never knew at all. Giant human forms, of enigmatic origin in the abyss of time, emergent, yet now in retreat, from crumbling stone, among the old decay of Easter Island. The stone lamps, the lavers of holy water, and 200,000 shrines, each with its frail conscious beings, who reason and pray within, in the red dawn of Shinto Japan. The convents of Tibet, and Burma, and Siam, where thousands upon thousands of devoted religious pray, and work, and sacrifice—the daily priestly offering of incense, fruit, and flowers, to the lord Buddha’s golden image, and his relics, in their precious shrine. The earth’s-dawn mysteries of Ur, and Agade, and Babylon: crumbled, earth-sprawled temples, where vultures call and jackals prowl, and all is distant, and dim, and past, the crumbling symbols of a mighty religious conception—the ziggurats, or ‘‘step- temples,” of Babylon and Ur, each a consciously planned microcosm, in form and detail, organically symbolizing all creation: the steps or degrees of created being.