Evolution in Religion

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ...scientifically for the rise of all religions ought not to overlook an ancient, powerful, and wide-spread religion like Brahmanism, whose definite philosophy makes it far more intelligible than are the traditions and superstitions of barbarous tribes. But this religion stands at the opposite pole of thought from Mr. Spencer's sjstem. That claims that religion is the projection of human life and relations into unknown regions of space and time; this asserts that all things in time and space proceed from one eternal Spirit, of whom the waters and the light are but the garment, and who is the only light of all the bright gods, their life not apart from them only but in them. Brahmanism in its profoundest philosophy and deepest spirit is not polytheistic but monotheistic, and is a worship not of human ancestry deified, but of a divine center and source of life manifested in the works of creation. Buddhism seems in its forms of religious life to be the Roman Catholicism of Brahmanism, but in its spirit it is rather the Protestantism of Brahmanism. Brahmanism lays stress on meditation and seeks by withdrawal from the world to attain to the end of human existence by reabsorption into Brahma. 1 Rig Veda--quoted in Johnson's " Oriental Religions," p. 117, India. Buddhism lays stress upon the spirit and duties of life. It presses upon men the cultivation of justice, mercy, love. The evil of existence is to be escaped from not through numberless births and deaths, not by meditation chiefly, but by a right life, by right belief, right judgment, right utterance, right occupations, right obedience, right memory, right meditation or keeping the mind fixed on permanent truths. Buddhism accepts the belief in three worlds--the world of absolute being, the...