Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/48

The Orphic, Mithraic, and Eleusinian Mysteries undoubtedly hinted at many of the imaginative conceptions in Christian dogma. The worship of Osiris must have anticipated many more. But it is in the blending of the race-vision of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome that the astounding doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection managed to reach their human apogee.

And when we remember that these notions have emerged, not out of the lonely brains of semi-scientific philosophers, but out of the anonymous instincts of the race itself, it becomes possible enough that they may afford a clue to the hidden impulses of the universe quite as significant as the rational theories of individual thinkers.

No one really, in spite of all progress, knows any better what lies behind the dream of life than people did in the days of Job or in the days of Rameses.

Still over our heads and under our feet stretches the incredible monstrosity of boundless space. Still before us and behind us stretches the incredible monstrosity of boundless time. Still when we sink into our minds we find the movements of consciousness itself turning eternally in one and the same fatal circle.

Science reduces everything to invisible electric forces, mathematics to invisible logical entities;