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Updated: June 8, 2025
In vain we shall seek to cheat our souls and to fill a void which cannot be filled by the manufacture of artificial religions and the affectation of a spiritual language to which, however persistently and fervently it may be used, no realities correspond. If one of these cults could get itself established, in less than a generation it would become hollower than the hollowest of ecclesiasticisms.
Yet there was not a beast in all that crew of which its master or mistress was not ready to affirm that it could do everything but talk! No one says that of you, my gentle guardian; for dog-worship, with all the ten thousand fungoid cults that sprang up and flourished exceedingly in the muddy marsh of man's intellect, has withered quite away, and left no seed.
Change seems the active principle of all dissent; new cults are forever springing up in the mystic childlike minds of the Tsar's great peasant family, nor could one expect uniformity of confession, when the size and neighbours of that family are considered, for Mohammedan, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and Shamanist surround it, are made subject to it, and eventually become a part thereof.
First of all, does it not provide a complete and overwhelming justification of those scholars who have insisted upon the importance of these Vegetation cults a justification of which, from the very nature of their studies, they could not have been aware?
As long as the various districts of Babylonia were not formally united under one head, various local cults might rise to equally large proportions, while the gods worshipped as the special patrons of the great centers, as Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Nippur, and the like, would retain their prominence, even though the political status of the cities sacred to them suffered a decline.
I cannot of course go at length into these different cults, but I may say roughly that of all or nearly all the deities above-mentioned it was said and believed that: They were born on or very near our Christmas Day. They were born of a Virgin-Mother. And in a Cave or Underground Chamber. They led a life of toil for Mankind.
"What I term chemicalization is the upheaval produced when immortal Truth is destroying erroneous mortal belief. Great care is to be taken as to the patient's mental environment. Mrs. Eddy's constant emphasis upon this explains the excessive separatist nature of Christian Science. More than almost any other of its cults it separates its followers from those who do not belong to the cult.
Women and children who resisted were killed, the rest were divided among the other villages as prisoners, but virtually adopted. Thus tenaciously have the Hopi clung to their old religion noncombatants so long as new cults among them do not attempt to stop the old. There are Christian missionaries among them today, notably Baptists, but they are quite safe, and the Hopi treat them well.
They are the founders of religious, cults, fads and fancies. They inculcate the permanent ideals, because they are the only ones who interest themselves in something beside the show of the universe. But too often they are the sick folk. Without the hardihood and the energy to conquer the outer world, they fall back on a world requiring less energy to study, less energy to conquer.
But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actual adventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have not been thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken away from the older organizations and taken their own line, using such material as seems proper for their purpose.
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