The primitive religion, whose symbols were the immovable stone of the hearth, and the ancestral tomb, — a religion which had established the ancient family, and had afterwards organized the city, —changed with time, and grew old. ...Men began to have an idea of immaterial nature; the notion of the human soul became more definite, and almost at the same time that of a divine intelligence sprang up in their minds. Could they still believe in the divinities of the primitive ages, of those dead men who lived in the tomb, of those Lares who had been men, of those holy ancestors whom it was necessary to continue to nourish with food? Such a faith became impossible. ...Some believed in annihilation, others in a second and entirely spiritual existence in a world of spirits. In these cases they no longer admitted that the dead lived in the tomb, supporting themselves upon offerings. They also began to have too high an idea of the divine to persist in believing that the dead were gods. On the contrary, they imagined the soul going to seek its recompense in the Elysian Fields, or going to pay the penalty of its crimes; and by a notable progress, they no longer deified any among men... [T]he Lares and Heroes [had] lost the adoration of all who thought. As to the sacred fire, which appears to have had no significance, except so far as it was connected with the worship of the dead, that also lost its prestige. Men continued to have a domestic fire in the house, to salute it, to adore it, and to offer it libations; but this was now only a customary worship, which faith no longer vivified. [Analogously], [t]he public hearth of the city, or prytaneum, ...they had forgotten...[,] represented the invisible life of the national ancestors, founders, and heroes. ...At the same time a few great sanctuaries, like those of Delphi and Delos, attracted men, and made them forget their local worship. The mysteries and the doctrines which these taught accustomed them to disdain the empty and meaningless religion of the city. ... Then philosophy appeared, and [finally] overthrew all the rules of the ancient polity.

The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

It is true that some of the teachings of these ancient religions or philosophies which by many ages preceded the respective eras of Mohammedanism and Christianity are now more or less degenerate. In addition, they have been grossly misunderstood and misinterpreted by Occidental scholars. (Chapter 11)

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished.
They live no longer in the faith of reason!

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.

The worship of Shiva, Vishnu, and other popular deities was of the same and in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo or Minerva. ... A religion may linger on for a long time, it may be accepted by large masses of the people, because it is there, and there is nothing better. But when a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word; and in that sense the old orthodox Brahmanism has ceased to live for more than a thousand years.

Already during the Middle Ages, the memory of a Negro Egypt that had civilized the world had been blurred by ignorance of the antique tradition hidden in libraries or buried under ruins. It would become even more obscure during those four centuries of slavery.

Greek and Roman religion depended on images, quite literally: there were no sacred laws or scripture and certainly no organised church or priesthood to police practice and correct error. It was in their images and their names that the gods persisted for at least two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors.

"The failure of Hellenism has been, largely, a matter of organization. Rome never tried to impose any sort of worship upon the countries it conquered and civilized; in fact, quite the contrary, Rome was eclectic. All religions were given an equal opportunity and even Isis — after some resistance — was worshipped at Rome. As a result we have a hundred important gods and a dozen mysteries. Certain rites are — or were — supported by the state because they involved the genius of Rome. But no attempt was ever made to coordinate the worship of Zeus on the Capitol with, let us say, the Vestals who kept the sacred fire in the old forum. As time passed our rites became, and one must admit it bluntly, merely form, a reassuring reminder of the great age of the city, a token gesture to the old gods who were thought to have founded and guided Rome from a village by the Tiber to world empire. Yet from the beginning, there were always those who mocked. A senator of the old Republic once asked an auger how he was able to get through a ceremony of divination without laughing. I am not so light-minded, though I concede that many of our rites have lost their meaning over the centuries; witness those temples at Rome where certain verses learned by rote are chanted year in and year out, yet no one, including the priests, knows what they mean, for they are in the early language of the Etruscans, long since forgotten.

As the religious forms of the state became more and more rigid and perfunctory, the people were drawn to the mystery cults, many of them Asiatic in origin. At Eleusis or in the various caves of Mithras, they were able to get a vision of what this life can be, as well as a foretaste of the one that follows. There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practica

As the study of paved the way for those changes of thought which went to form the and remade Europe, so now the study of the languages and literature of ancient Egypt and Babylonia is likely to revolutionize our views of the Bible.

If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism, that no religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its founder and its first apostles. Yet it is but seldom borne in mind that without constant reformation, i.e. without a constant return to its fountan-head, every religion, even the most perfect, nay the most perfect on account of its very perfection, more even than others, suffers from its contact with the world, as the purest air suffers froln the mere fact of its being breathed. Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbors, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offer often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples. As soon as a religion is established, and more particularly when it has become the religion of a powerful state, the foreign and worldly elements encroach more and more on the original foundation, and human interests mar the simplicity and purity of the plan which the founder had conceived in his own heart, and matured in his communings with his God. Even those who lived with Buddha misunderstood his words, and at the Great Council which had to settle the Buddhist canon, Asoka, the Indian Constantine had to remind the assembled priests that "what had been said by Buddha, that alone was well said;" and that certain works ascribed to Buddha, as, for instance, the instruction given to his son, Râhula, were apocryphal, if not heretical.

The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins.

* In spite of the fact that one knew it all beforehand as an Englishman would to whom India in picture and by hearsay was familiar from childhood, who had played with brass s and had broken gilt alabaster s and s and s (with dire corporeal results) before he donned , it was strange to me to realize the fact of the actual worship of Ganesa and Siva and Vishnu in their own land in the temples of their cults at , as strange as if I were to find and still venerated in some Egyptian temple such as or . Egypt and her gods and priests all alive, mixed up with London; with the , , , the , and the : that was the impression I gained of Bombay. There was no doubt of the specifically English (not merely European) impression, and the combination is extraordinary. I felt I loved better Egypt, where the old gods are safely dead and their lore can be studied by such as I without impossible modern contaminations and antinomies, where the ; now calls uncontradicted the simple praises of the One, where the clean desert air breathes health, not septic soddenness, and where one is not likely nowadays to find an - in one’s bed.