Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

I I 8 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMquity points back to this original revelation with acertitude like that which the comparative grammar ofthe various Aryan nations creates in the mind as tothe original Indo-Germanic language. The identityof the verb To Be, of the numerals, and of the wordsbetokening the primary relations of life, in Sanscrit,Greek, Latin, Teutonic, and the other members of thfamily, proves that in a far back antiquity the hearthexisted at which they all sat as brethren. In the sameway the existence of this fourfold system in the timepreceding the Christian faith in Greece and Rome andother heathen nations, proves the voice which communicatedit to man, and the hand which impressed it onhim. That voice indeed spoke, and that hand wasimpressed with such force in the institution of thebloody sacrifices of animals, that man carried on fromage to age an arrangement of peculiar and intricaterites based upon one notion so specific that manyvarious nations could not have hit upon it separately,and so singular that reason could not have devised itfor itself.When the pursuit of wisdom arose among a peoplewhose life had been moulded by institutions such asthese, what should we expect its proper work to be ?Was it not to disengage the truth from its corruption,to purify and strengthen the positive beliefwhich formed the ore, to detach and reject thescoria which had adhered to it. And indicationsof such a course in the early Greek philosophy arevisible. Thus at its very rise in the sixth centurybefore Christ, Xenophanes leaped at once by the conclusionsof his own reasoning to a conception of thedeity which formed the strongest contrast with thepopular Polytheism. Looking upon the heaven, he