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The better part is that which is NON-ORIGINAL. All that is fair and beautiful in Christian morality had been taught in the world ages before Christ was born. Christ taught the duty of returning good for evil. Lao-Tsze says: "The good I would meet with goodness. The not good I would meet with goodness also. The faithful I would meet with faith. The not faithful I would meet with faith also.
Deities of the higher sort, by the very nature of savage reflections on death and on its non-original casual character, are prior, or may be prior, or cannot be shown not to be prior, to the ghost theory the alleged origin of religion. For their evolution the ghost theory is not logically demanded; they can do without it.
But, at any rate, any question as to their nature is irrelevant to an inquiry like the present, viz. how we get the non-original part of our knowledge. And so also is the distinction in German metaphysics, between the mind's acts and its passive states. Enough for us now that they are all states of the mind. II. Substances.
The teachings He gave may also be acknowledged to be non-original; but where the student of Comparative Mythology thinks that he has proved that none is divinely inspired, when he shows that similar moral teachings fell from the lips of Manu, from the lips of the Buddha, from the lips of Jesus, the occultist says that certainly Jesus must have repeated the teachings of His predecessors, since He was a messenger from the same Lodge.
Both kinds may have a generic name, such as kalou, or wakan, but the specific distinction is universally made by low savages. On one hand, original gods; on the other, non-original gods that were once ghosts. It is part of my theory that the more popular ghost-worship of souls of people whom men have loved, invaded the possibly older religion of the Supreme Father.
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