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Then he ran through the city holding the bloody parts in his hands and threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career." We see that this act directly corresponds with the part played by the female. The female prostituted herself, and the male presented his generative powers to the deity. Both the sacred prostitutes and emasculated priests were held in religious veneration.
On the contrary, He is there pronounced 'past finding out, incomprehensible, and the like. 'Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection? are questions put by an 'inspired writer, who felt the cloudy and unsatisfactory nature of all human conceit concerning Deity.
"My first mother," he used to call her; and to him she stood as a sort of deity. "My first mother stands to me for love; my second mother for discipline; my father for justice," he once said to Halliday. I am not sure that Beecher had a well-defined idea of either discipline or justice, but love to him was a very vivid and personal reality.
If Hebrew bethel was originally a stone considered as the abode of a deity, then in the Old Testament the earlier form of the conception has been effaced by the later thought the word 'bethel' has become the name of a place, a shrine, the dwelling place of God.
I endeavoured to persuade the most intelligent of the existence of a Deity who could reward or punish; but beyond this I dared not venture, as they would have asked practical questions, which I could not have explained to their material understanding. I extract verbatim from my journal the short entry of 31st December, 1872 :
First there were offerings and prayers to the god to avert calamities and give prosperity; then they feasted with and before their god, and after that any strangers present might eat. At the same settlement a marine deity called Tamauanuu, or Plenty for the land, was worshipped at the same time. On that day no one dared to swim on his back off the settlement, or eat a cocoa-nut.
But this enthusiasm, this supernatural taste for misery, has been soon forced to yield to nature. The successors of these volunteers in poverty sold to the devout people their prayers, and their intercessions with the Deity. They became rich and powerful. Thus monks and hermits lived in indolence, and under colour of charity, impudently devoured the substance of the poor.
Dermot knew that an elephant thus marked by Nature would be regarded by Hindus as sacred to Gunesh, their God of Wisdom, who is represented as having the head of an elephant with a single tusk, the right. Many natives would consider the animal to be a manifestation of the god himself and worship it as a deity. So the Major made no comment on the coolie's remark, but said: "What is your name?"
They find themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any possibility of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all.
The motion of the earth would not affect such narrow bodies of water as the Canadian lakes, but the moon's power of attraction would, if it existed to the extent supposed, be under the necessity of doing it, unless she prefers salt to fresh liquors. One may venture, now-a-days, to express such a doubt, particularly as Madam Moon is a Pagan deity.
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