When I think of the sublime creeds of different eras,
Some left glimmering yet, others quite faded out,
I enter into the thoughts of the different theological faiths,
Effuse all that the believing Egyptian would, all that the Greek, all that the Hindu worshipping Brahma, the Presbyterian, the Catholic with his crucifix and saints, the Turk with the Koran;
I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much as we now belong to it.

Great are the myths, I too delight in them,
The elder religions, myths and fables of eld, 
The primitive fables, the myths Asiatic, Africa’s fables,
The rhythmic myths of the Greeks,
The deep-diving bibles and legends, the strong legends of the Romans,
The flowing literatures, tremendous epics,
The fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity,
The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable.

I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception,
The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,
Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams,
Lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold,
Spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven!

Those poems of pure thought and fancy surely are more marvelous in their infantine spontaneity than any more mature production of the races which evolv’d them;
The best part of literature and religion are, in my opinion, the indirect results of these fables, these guesses at truth.

I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god,
Honoring the gods, my unknown lovers, faithful and true,
Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, his grandson the strong divine young man the Hercules, the beautiful nocturnal son the full-limb’d Bacchus,
Buying drafts of Osiris and Adonai, Kneph drest in blue, with the crown of feathers on his head,
The tender and junior Buddha, Confucius himself.

Jehovah, old occult Brahma, and Saturnius, ever with those mighty laws rolling,
Executing righteous judgments inexorable—whoever sins dies—
Vengeance stern and vindictive, unpersuadable, relentless,
Gloating in the agony of sinners to be punished, without the least remorse—
Therefore let none expect mercy.

Satan, comrade of criminals, crafty, despised,
A drudge, ignorant, huge, frowning, sorrowful,
With sudra face and worn brow, but proud as any,
Full of guile, brooding, with many wiles,
Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt,
In new lands duly appearing, (and old ones also,)
Permanent, warlike, equal with any, real as any.

And there are other divinities; they are not of the hell and damnation sort; they are not of the legs and arms sort—the personal sort. They yet remain, more firmly on their thrones, in the race, than ever; they continue their supremacy.

Time falls back,
I see the old signifiers—the libation, circumcision, baptism, ablution, confession,
I see the place of the idea of the deity incarnated by avatars in human forms,
I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of gods,
Where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high.

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
Sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, llamas, monks, muftis.
O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun,
With idols ranged along the sides or at the end,
You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest!
You too with joy I sing.

I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings,
The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen,
The old Egyptian singers, singing before the Pharaohs,
The Coptic refrain toward sundown, pensively falling on the breast of the black venerable vast mother the Nile.

I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre, the Hebrew reading his records and psalms, Hebrew prophets chanting, rapt, ecstatic,
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear the responsive bass and soprano,
I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
I see the worshippers within—foot-worn pilgrims welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets of Mecca!
Nor form nor sermon, argument nor word,
But silent, strange, devout, rais’d, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.

I listen to the sacred imperial hymns of China,
To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone,)
To Hindu flutes and the fretting twang of the vina,
To the Hindu sage teaching his favorite pupil his recitative in Sanskrit,
The ancient poems and laws, the loves, wars, adages,
Transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three thousand years ago. 

I see religious dances old and new,
I see again those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,
The wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding each other,
Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, beating the serpent-skin drum.
I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs,
Dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic shouts, as they spin around turning always towards Mecca.
At Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing,
Formless, free, religious dances,
I hear them clapping their hands as they bend their bodies,
I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet.

I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors. I see them raised high with stones that the dead men’s spirits when they wearied of their quiet graves might rise up through the mounds and gaze on the tossing billows, and be refresh’d by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

Egyptian religion represents that phase of development full of belief, rich and divine enough. The central idea seems to have been the wonderfulness and divinity of life—nothing more wonderful than life—standing amazed and awed before the mystery of life exemplified in any object, even in a hawk, a bull, or a cat. The beetle, the bull were divine in that they exemplified the inexplicable mystery of life. It was a profound and exquisite religion.

The pagan religions, grouped into one and led by the Greek theology, appreciated and expressed the sense of nature, life, beauty, the objective world, and of fate, immutable law.
The Greek nation was the most remarkable one after all. The key to the Greek character is this: freedom, expression, candor, passion, weeping, laughing—yet all these reined in, reason prevailing over all—reason, understanding, the last, the preserving, the balancing, the governing, quality.

Hebrews—the spiritual element, the indefinite, the immortal, sublimity, the realm to which the material tends, the realm of shadows, meditation, the influence of the stars in solitude at night, the sublime idea of a coming man or savior, a perfect individual.

The Bible is a poem to me. I have had this particular book about me now for twenty years—always have it by me to read. It lasts—comes back to me. Am I not a biblical fellow myself—born and bred in Hebrewism—the old forerunners, teachers, prophets?
The religion of the Bible is a beautiful advanced stage in the never-ending humanitarianism of the world, unsurpass’d in proverbs, in religious ecstasy, in suggestions of common mortality and death—the spirit everything, the ceremonies and forms of the churches nothing, faith limitless, its immense sensuousness immensely spiritual.
After you have got rid of all your dogmas then you can read the Bible—realize its immensity—not till then.

How many ages and generations have brooded and wept and agonized over this book!
What untellable joys and ecstasies from it,
To what myriads has it been the shore and rock of safety,
The refuge from driving tempest and wreck—
For you Jew journeying in your old age through every risk to stand once on Syrian ground!
You other Jews waiting in all lands for your Messiah!

It is wonderful how such a contradictory repertoire was brought together and has held sway. Or is this diversity the very reason it has held together? Has there been something to touch or approach every phase of human want, development, tenderness, fanaticism, etc.?

Christianity came as a protest against a too great tendency towards militarism. In an era which could acknowledge nothing but the military virtues—which, high as they are, are not by any means the highest—it furnished a purifying, freshening of the race. In the Christian cultus the moral dominates—gentleness, love, the distinctions of right and wrong.

Who, what, was the true Jesus? I can’t tell; can you? The tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful God the Christ, what we know of it, is so faded, so pale, as well as so manufactured (almost theatrical) that we can form no definite idea, no plausible estimate, of what Jesus can have been like.
But I think of him always as that fragrant lily of souls, whose life was perfect,
Knowing assuredly that he is divine,
The all-loving man, brother of rejected persons—
Of slaves, felons, idiots, and of insane and diseased persons—
The touch of whose hands and feet was miracles.

Lo! the Lord Christ, the promis’d one advancing, with gentle hand extended—
I am affection, I am the cheer-bringing God,
Dispeller of evil, uniter of the estranged, reconciler,
Assuager of sorrows, consoler,
The lover true, with hope and all-enclosing charity.
Many times have I been rejected, taunted, put in prison, and crucified, and many times shall be again,
Young and strong I pass knowing well I am destin’d to an early death,
But my sweet love bequeath’d here and elsewhere never dies,
My wisdom dies not, neither early nor late.

Too much is made of the execution of Jesus Christ,
The beautiful god bearing the cross,
The blood and sweat streaming down his face, his neck—
Jesus Christ would not have approved of this himself.
He never wished to shine, especially to shine at the general expense,
He knew that his life was only another life, any other life, told big.
I see martyrdoms wherever I go; it is an average factor in life. The tragedies of the average man, the tragedies of every day—the tragedies of war and peace—the obscured, the lost, tragedies—they are all cut out of the same goods.
Christianity confirmed, justified, and explicated humanity. The acceptance of Christianity was not a credit to Jesus, but to the human race, that it could see, and seeing, welcome him.

Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,
Lo! the Lord Christ brings the perfumed bread, ever vivifying and clean, to me,
Ever fresh and plenty, ever welcome and to spare.
I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute those who are with you, before and since, and those to come also,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
All the world have I given up for my dear brothers’ and sisters’ sake, for the soul’s sake,
All sorrow, labor, suffering, I, tallying it, absorb in myself.

We few equals, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,
Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
We all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession,
Indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
We walk unheld, free, the whole earth over,
Till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras,
That the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.

So far concerns the Catholic church, I have read with deep interest of the royal, gorgeous, superb displays in the high cathedrals, dim, with gorgeous colored windows, the solemn hymns and masses rousing adoration, an unwonted charm in those fresh, quaint tunes and hymns. It is grand, grand—O how grand!
The sacrament, all done solemnly, without noise—done in a way to appeal to your sense of right weight and measure—proportion, proportion! Here the divine Christ, destin’d to an early death, expounds eternal truth—expounds the soul, once more eating the bread of his last supper in the midst of youths and old persons.
Yet it has one defect: it lacks simplicity—it has deferred too much to certain sensational elements in its history and environment.

But the Protestant ideas of purity, abnegation of self, terminate often in a diseased benevolence, voluntary penances, celibacy, the bloodless, cast-iron virtue—gaunt Calvinism. 

Yet I take in all religions, have perfect faith in all sects,
Not rejecting a single item of the earlier programs,
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern—
Saluting the sun, making a fetish of the first rock or stump, and all idols and images,
Drinking mead from the skull-cup,
Spotted with gore from the stone and knife, 
Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
To Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,
Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified,
To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew,
Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me—
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Accepter of all religions, preferer of none,
I receive the great inheritance with welcome joy, not inclined to reject a single one.

NEXT: THE END OF THE CHURCHES

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