Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
The first was the study of classical literature, which familiarised men with methods of philosophising; with conceptions of the highest Good; with ideas of the order of Nature; with notions of Literary and Historical Criticism; and, above all, with visions of Art, of a kind which not only would not fit into the scholastic scheme, but showed them a pre-Christian, and indeed altogether un-Christian world, of such grandeur and beauty that they ceased to think of any other.
There is no personage who rises to the sublime height of Zeus, or the incomparable union of beauty and wisdom in Pallas Athene: what forms Bel, or Crom, or Bride, the queen of Celtic song, may have worn to the pre-Christian ages we know not, nor can know; but the minor creations of Grecian fancy, with which they peopled their groves and fountains, are true kindred of the brain, to the innocent, intelligent, and generally gentle inhabitants of the Gaelic Fairyland.
For various as are the different forms of 'death by the stauros' of which descriptions have come down to us from pre-Christian ages and the first three centuries of our era, no relic of that date bears a representation of an instrument of execution such as we cause to appear in our sacred pictures, and even if, regardless of the more exact meaning of the word stauros, we suppose the term staurosis to have included every form of carrying out the extreme penalty by means of affixion or suspension, we meet with no description of such an instrument of execution as we picture.
To suppose that the Devil, long before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the power and the ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty though the ingenuity with which the early Church DID itself suppress all information about these pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to Satan!
I admitted to Antonio that, since I was in Italy again, I intended to investigate the case of a Perugian peasant girl who, though she had never been associated with educated persons, was subject to trances in which she babbled the Greek language of Cleopatra's time, and accurately described the appearance of pre-Christian Alexandria. "I am writing a book on such matters," I concluded.
It may, therefore, happen and this quite independently of the growth of a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism to it that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of or perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State.
The highest point reached in the evolution of pre-Christian prayer is when the gods, as knowing best what is good, are petitioned simply for things good. Our Lord's prayer is a revelation which the theory of evolution cannot account for or explain. Nor does Höffding's "antinomy of religious feeling" present itself to the Christian soul as an antinomy . . . 138-174
In a communication to the Russian Geographical Society, M. Pogodin makes the statement, that there still exist a synagogue and a cemetery in the Crimea that belong to the pre-Christian era.
"But the pre-Christian cult of the cross was not confined to Savoy and the environs of Lyons. A glance at the coins of ancient Gaul is sufficient to show that it existed in nearly every part" M. de Mortillet, crossing the frontier and dealing with the said tombs of Gola-Secca near Milan in Italy, sums up as follows
There are few signs of dependence on necromancy in China, India, Persia, and Rome. Teraphim were employed, probably, for divination, but there is no proof that they were connected with necromancy. After the sixth century B.C. we hear nothing of consultation of the dead by the pre-Christian Jews. Among the Greeks also such consultation seems not to have enjoyed a high degree of favor.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking