The absurd futility of this book may be a corrective of the evil that is in it.
Page 118 and following. All this is not only morally disgusting, but ridiculously absurd. I have already noticed how this hobby of nature impressions, and human progress from it, is unnatural folly. As if a mother only knew what a mother was by long progress of human nature from physical phenomena! It is too absurd. A cow has more truth than that. And the application of phenomena to these things shows the things were known. In Hebrew none of this is true as to the language. It is only true where man has followed his own thoughts. And words cannot NOW express sacred relations unless sacred relations are there to be expressed. He says: ‘The history of words carries us back to an age in which not a single abstract term existed, in which human speech expressed mere bodily wants and mere sensual motions, while it conveyed no idea of morality or of religion. If every name which throughout the whole world is or has been employed as a name of the One Eternal God, the Maker and Sustainer of all things, was originally a name only for some sensible object or phenomenon, it follows that there was an age, the duration of which we cannot measure, but during which man had not yet risen to any consciousness of his relation to the great Cause of all that he saw or felt around him. If all the words which now denote the most sacred relations of kindred and affinity were at the first names conveying no such special meaning, if the words father, mother, sister, daughter, were words denoting merely the power or occupation of the persons spoken of, then there was a time during which the ideas now attached to the words had not yet been developed. But the sensuousness which in one of its results produced mythology could not fail to influence in whatever degree the religious growth of mankind. This sensuousness consisted in ascribing to all physical objects the same life of which men were conscious themselves.' It proves that man had got into materialism—a very important point. But his argument only shows that man was bad, which badness, though he cannot deny it, led to the Mylitta worship he seeks to excuse as simplicity, though admitting that No degradation could well be greater than that of the throngs who hurried to the temples of the Babylonian Mylitta.' But his theory would prove that God created man thus bad, and that man formed himself gradually into morality. When he goes on to bring in Moses putting the serpent on the pole in the Desert as Phallic worship, and Eve's temptation to figures of the same source of evil, it is too morally imbecile to deserve any attention, and so in the note to page 116. He says: The phallic tree. is introduced into the narrative of the book of Genesis, but it is here called a tree of good and evil, that knowledge which dawns in the mind with the first consciousness of difference between man and woman. In contrast with this tree of carnal indulgence leading to death is the tree of life, denoting the higher existence for which man was designed, and which would bring with it the happiness and the freedom of the children of God. In the brazen serpent of the Pentateuch the two emblems of the cross and serpent, the quiescent and energizing Phallos, are united.'
But the whole book is Sun-godship run mad. But the Lingam is Siva clearly, not Vishnu, so he is every way wrong. But how simply the Fall accounts for all these things! And then the serpent turning himself into life, love making knowledge, eternity is the complete triumph of the enemy over deluded man, and poor Mr. Cox's book is his bible.
But this admission, page 129, that 'time was when human speech had none but sensuous words, and mankind none but sensuous ideas,' while true only of idolatry, yet is the witness how utterly man was fallen. Because if moral ideas are true now, they were always true, yet confessedly man had not one of them. If piety to a father is a sacred duty now, it always was. But it was only the devil or lust, not so much, as I have said, as a cow's feeling for its calf, according to the Rev. G. W. Cox. To say, page 130, that, 'The images of outward and earthly objects have been mad the means of filling human hearts and minds with the keenest yearnings for divine truth, beauty and love,' and may have been the only way, is really imbecility, but quite worthy of modern rationalism. That the renovation of nature, connected with the Sun's return from the winter solstice was the origin of every sort of corruption, and had the largest part in idolatrous worship and its worst part, is sorrowfully true. But the whole book is excessively superficial, and the pretended inductions often puerile. Even Pantheism in Brahmanism is not seen, nor its connection with the innate sense of there being One True God 'who is over all and through' (not 'in') 'all.'