Shakespeare

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: our schoolmasters teach us to deny them ? But to Positi- vists they furnish the master-clue for every larger historical inquiry. Time will not permit me to call evidence to-day from the primitive Fetichisms under which Man first arose as Man, nor from the grand Theocracies which laid the deep foundations...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: our schoolmasters teach us to deny them ? But to Positi- vists they furnish the master-clue for every larger historical inquiry. Time will not permit me to call evidence to-day from the primitive Fetichisms under which Man first arose as Man, nor from the grand Theocracies which laid the deep foundations of Social Order, nor from the Polytheisms of Greece and Rome which led forward Humanity on her splendid progress. The extract I have read from Sleeman must serve as general type, the rest your sympathy must supply. But I take up the theme at Catholicism. On the wreck of the old Polytheisms, once so full of mirth and beauty, ?as the genius of Milton affectionately recalls in his Ode on the Nativity, ?arose Catholicism. At the outset, this was an austere religion indeed. Read the Epistles of S. Paul, and you would think no good man had the right or the power to laugh, or to enjoy himself in any way. It is not easy, is it, to reconcile S. Paul and Shakespeare? The Earth no abiding city, but a vale of tears, of sin and sorrow and repentance; and the Christian, each individual Christian, a mere stranger and sojourner, seeking his own personal salvation, to be enjoyed in the unseen world to come. So it was declared and prescribed. Viewed as a permanency, this was an Arctic faith, uninhabitable to men; it really was a wintry faith, having latent in it a beautiful spring and summer. It was a complete parting from the Polytheism of the past, its works and ways, which had worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. It was a demand for spiritual life clenched and intensified by the absolute Monotheistic creed into a stern protest against the corruptions of Roman society which had ensued upon the decay of their early creeds and upon their sudden possession of the spoils of a..