§ 4

Our primitive ancestors were driven by an ardent worship of the Power within the Sun. Like the Greeks they must set up a great temple to the Giver of Life, who made their crops ripen, who was to them an ocular vision of an unravelled mystery, the Prime Author of All! of Him who holds our destinies, our life and death in the palm of His hand! That is what urged them. No commercial spirit came between them and a great Ideal for which to labour and make manifest.

They fetched huge monoliths from Normandy. Frail crafts bore them over the rough sea to the shore of England, whence they were dragged to their destination. Do we think that such a tremendous, so dangerous an enterprise as this, was carried out under no higher motive than an industrial company?

There probably was some Oriental blood in this ancient folk of England. All Art, indeed all Science, had its birth place in the land of the “Rising Sun.” Like the Chaldeans, the race that made Stonehenge were astronomers. Upon a certain morning and at a certain hour of the year they knew the rising sun would hit a certain spot. They knew the exact direction of the ray that would do so. There they placed their altar to the God of Light, the All Beneficent One! We know now that some centuries before the Roman conquest of England the south of the island was highly civilised, but who by is not clear. They must have been a highly artistic people, possibly Kelts, possibly a race which had been or was in touch with Mykene, because the metal work that has survived time partakes of the character of both Keltic and Mycenian craftsmanship. Whoever they were, they brought art to savage islanders; hence they sowed the seeds of their ideals and of perfect craftsmanship, to fructify in those days of England’s greatness before the weed of Industrialism and the darkness it shed over the country had become a poisonous fetish. Of that grim subject more presently. The Mithra myth came here from the East and nearly won as a religion of blood sacrifice. But a stronger prevailed—the first created thing, Love. The Jews and Romans crucified Jesus Christ. They thought thus to obliterate His teaching, to wipe out the Ideal He taught, the Utopia He would erect—a kingdom of the soul that He would revive in the materialistic Roman decay. They did kill His body, but His immortal soul survives. They killed Him as King of the Jews, but left Him living as Monarch of the human race. The eggshell may be broken without killing the embryo within it. Love, pure love, so sought for in religions, so nobly conceived by the “poor pagan” Socrates, took hold of the hearts of primitive Christians, as the Delphic myth of Apollo of the primitive Greeks, and God’s forgiveness of man’s rashness and brutality when He set the bow in the sky as a sign of mercy, not only to Hebrews but the whole world. Salvation by blood sacrifice is a crude idea; Salvation through Love is a noble one.