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The deification of the dead, man-worship, or hero-worship, the next development of the religious idea after fetichism, was simply an acknowledgment of the belief in a future life; for the dead could not have been deified unless after death they had continued to live. The adoration of a putrid carcass would have been a form of fetichism lower and more degrading than any that has been discovered.
I have always maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not in the wind or thunder of the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice of Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or cruelty.
If so, then I want to know how Jesus Christ, in that upper chamber, founding the sole continuous rite of the religion which He established, and making its heart and centre the remembrance of His own personality, can be cleared from the charge of diverting to Himself what belongs to God only, and how you and I, if we obey His commands, escape the crime of idolatry and man-worship?
In order to quicken your progress you need abstract as well as concrete ideals. The secret of all rapid and startling spiritual development is man-worship. By man-worship I mean devotion to, reverence, and intense and all-absorbing passion for the perfect individual man of realization a Mahapurusha. Christ, Buddha and Vivekananda were all such-type men.
The country needs less man-worship and more God-worship. It needs less adulation of beautiful women, and more real appreciation of true womanhood. There is a great deal of art-worship in Paris, but it does not seem to really elevate the condition of the people. The pictures and the statues are generally of the most sensuous kind. Do these things improve the morals of a city or nation?
They speak a various language of oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave. Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let the President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes.
But man-worship came after fetichism. It was a higher development of the religious sentiment, and included a possible hope for, if not a positive belief in, a future life. Reason, then, as well as revelation, leads us irresistibly to the conclusion that these two doctrines prevailed among the descendants of Noah, immediately after the deluge.
The whole country through which he passed, electrified by the French Revolution, appeared alive with excitement; and the honors which the republicans, in their antipathy to aristocracy, had been anxious to withhold from Washington because it was man-worship, were lavished upon the person of the representative of the French republic without stint.
The confidence and love reposed in him may have been man-worship, without ground or reason, but it was no less real and positive. While in the Command-in-Chief, everything had gone well, and the Butler and Burnside expeditions, the two great successes of the war, had been planned and executed.
As the divine Principle is comprehended, God's omnipotence and omnipresence will dawn on mortals, and the notion of an everywhere-present body or of an infinite Mind starting from a finite body, and returning to it will disappear. Ever-present Love must seem ever absent to ever-present selfishness or material sense. Hence this asking amiss and receiving not, and the common idolatry of man-worship.
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