Professor Draper's Book [pp. 155-174]

Professor Draper's Books.
the human race in the earliest stage
of its existence, nor the germ from
which all the various religions or
superstitions of the world have been
developed.
But we may go still farther. The
attempt to explain the origin and
course of religion by the study of the
various heathen mythologies, and
idolatries, and superstitions, is as absurd as to attempt to determine the
origin and course of the Christian
religion by the study of the thousand
and one sects that have broken off
from the church, and set up to be
churches themselves. They can
teach us nothing except the gradual
deterioration of religious thought, and
the development and growth of superstition or irreligion among those separated from the central religious
life of the race. In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies, on which the author dwells with
so much emphasis, we trace no gradual purification of the religious idea,
but its continual corruption and debasement. As the sects all presup pose the Christian church, and could
neither exist nor be intelligible with out her, so those various heathen my thologies presuppose the patriarchal
religion, are unintelligible without
it, and could not have originated or
exist without it. The professor hav ing studied these mythologies in the
darkness of no-religion, understands
nothing of them, and finds no sense
in them-as little sense as a man
ignorant of Catholicity would find in
the creeds, confessions, and religious
observances of the several Protestant
sects; but if he had studied them in
the light of the patriarchal religion,
which they mutilate, corrupt, or tra vesty, he might have understood
them, and have traced with a steady
hand their origin and course, and
their relation to the intellectual de velopment of the race.
We have no space to enter at
length into the question here sug
gested. In all the civilized heathen
nations, the gods are divided into
two classes, the Dii Majores and
the Dii Minores. The Dii Majores
are only the result of a false effort to
explain the mysterious dogma of the
Trinity, and the perversion of the
Christian doctrine of the Eternal
Generation of the Son, and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost.
The type from which these mythologies depart, not which they realize,
is undeniably the mystery of the
Trinity asserted, more or less explicitly, by the patriarchal religion;
and hence, we find them all, from
the burning South to the frozen
North, from the East to the West,
from the Old World to the New, asserting, in some form, in the Divinity
the sacred and mysterious Triad.
The Dii Minores are a corruption or
perversion of the Catholic doctrine
of saints and angels, or that doctrine
is the type which has been perverted
or corrupted, by substituting heroes
for saints, and the angels that
fell for the angels that stood, and
taking these for gods instead of
creatures. The enemies of Christi anity have sufficiently proved that
the common type of both is given in
the patriarchal religion, hoping there by to get a conclusive argument
against Christianity; but they have
forgotten to state that, while the one
conforms to the type, the other de parts from it, perverts or corrupts it,
and that the one that conforms is
prior in date to the one that corrupts,
perverts or departs from it. No man
can study the patriarchal religion
without seeing at a glance that it is
the various forms of heathenism that
are the corrupt forms, as no man can
study both Catholicity and Protes tantism without seeing that Protes tantism is the corruption, or perver sion- sometimes even the travesty
of Catholicity. The same conclusion
I63