網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

"Do not ignore the past but study it - study it diligently as being the mightiest factor among the great factors of our human world." - Count Korzybske.

"Out of that past we have come. Into it we are constantly returning. Meanwhile it is of the utmost importance to our lives. It contains the roots of all we are, and of all we have of wisdom." - C. J. Keyser. "Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking."

FOREWORD

Sacred Books before 1000 B. С.

All Europe no doubt was "the wilderness eternal" at this early age, long before the days of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, excepting the southern point of Greece. However, a famous civilization flourished on the coast of Asia Minor under Minos, King of Crete, perhaps the most artistic the world ever has known. Mr. H. G. Wells claims their exquisite art was due to the fact that Cnosos (Κνωσός) had been at peace for over a thousand years!

The "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" probably were composed hundreds of years before the first beginnings of the Old Testament.* Yet Matthew Arnold says "Homer was rapid, clear, plain, and direct in thought and expression, and eminently noble."

And Dr. Eliot says in "The Harvard Classics" that "artistically, in spite of their early date, they are the product of a mature art," and "stand at the head of the literature of Greece and of the Epic poetry of the world."

What number of authors in all the world's history have won a greater meed of honor than "The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle "?

Agamemnon rouses the failing courage of his army by assuring them "Father Zeus will never be the protector of liars" and the son of Nestor proclaims that "all mankind hunger after God." Even if the Greeks were limited in the practice of their ideals by their intensely aristocratic form of government, their ethical ideals, at least, apparently were as lofty in aspiration as our own.

Although the writers of Genesis and Exodus make no mention of the pyramids, we know now that the Sphinx, Chephron, the brother of Cheops, had gazed across the Egyptian plains for over two thousand years before these books were written and the Pyramid of Cheops still remains one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Egyptian obelisk that now ornaments Central Park, New York, was erected near the site of Cairo almost one thousand years before the sublime First Chapter of Genesis was written by Jewish priests in captivity by the waters of Babylon.

* Gladstone gives 1200 B.C. as the date of the Homeric poems.

These obelisks which now stand in the Place de la Concorde. in Paris, on the Thames Embankment in London, and in Central Park, New York, are of such antiquity that Moses and his boyhood friends probably passed them on their way to school, for the two latter stood at the gate of the learned city of Heliopolis.

The superb civilization of Ancient Egypt reached the climax of its splendour in art and science between 3000 and 2400 В. С. At that time some of their portrait sculptures were of so high an order that they are incomparable and in delicacy of modelling never have been surpassed by any modern masterpieces.

It is said to have been due to their religious belief that the souls of human beings returned and dwelt in the statues erected in their honor, that the Egyptian artists attained such marvellous skill in portrait sculpture. So it was necessary to make the likeness as accurate as possible, in order that the "soul of the departed" should recognize at once, the earthly habitation.

The divine thirst for immortality has never been manifested more touchingly than in the ancient mummies of Egypt, that swathed with balsams and aromatic spices to prevent decay, survived for thousands of years, it being their religious belief that the soul could live on after death, only so long as the earthly body with which it had been connected, was preserved.

The great Indian Rishis however taught that the soul was supreme, unlimited by the body after death. So with splendid consistency they burned the body, which the soul had left, to get rid of it as soon as possible, while the Egyptian, on the contrary, strove to preserve it for thousands of years.

The Bible of the ancient Egyptians was the curious magical "Book of the Dead" that describes the strange adventures of their heroes after death, especially the day of judgment, when the heart of man was weighed in the "balance of justice" before Osiris and his judges.

« 上一頁繼續 »