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+1032+. Along with gifts, which formed perhaps the earliest method of conciliating divine beings, we find in very early times a number of procedures in honor of the deity, and intended in a general way to procure divine favor. Among these procedures dances and processions are prominent. The dance, as is observed above, is simply the transference to religious rites of a common social act.
The sphere of divine activity has been determined for men by their systems of physical science; the moral character of the gods is a reflection of human ethical conceptions; the internal activity of the deity in man's mind is defined by man's spiritual experience.
What conceivable application have such representations except to Jesus? We note, then, here: The solemn truth that His sufferings were divinely inflicted. It was the divine counsel that used men as its instruments, though they were none the less guilty.
For the Divine love had sought me, and penetrated me, and created a great need in me; like a seed that wants room to grow. I had been brought up in carelessness of the true faith; I had not studied the doctrines of our religion; but it seemed to take possession of me like a rising flood.
As a divine barrier it served originally in the world of the gods very much the same purpose as the material wall of stone did in the world of men.
The understanding must first assent, before the divine life can be brought into a conformity with divine laws. But we are not assuming theologic ground. It is the life to which we are looking. We said "The fundamental doctrine of Christian life." "All doctrine has relation to life, and I contend for faith as fundamental."
And, as the death of the divine victim is held to rescue the worshiper from punishment for ill doing, the conclusion is natural that the former stands in the place of the latter. In the higher forms of thought such substitution could only be voluntary on the part of the victim.
But, as in the course of time the general doctrine was developed which made the gods, on the whole, favorably inclined towards man, while the evil was ascribed to the demons as occupying the lower rank of divine beings we note the tendency also to ascribe the ills that humanity is heir to, to the forces that dwell under the earth, to Nergal and Allatu and to those who did their bidding.
The analysis which Greek writers made of the relation between the mental thought, the sound which utters it, and the mind which thinks it, was invested with special importance for the Jewish thinker, who transferred it from the human to the Divine sphere.
First, since we hold that the origin of all imaginative creation is a need, a desire, a tendency, where then is the origin of that inexhaustible fount of fancies? In the instinct for individual preservation, orientated in the direction of the future. Man seeks to divine future events, and by various means to act on the order of things to modify it for his own advantage or to appease his evil fate.
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