Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



grown — will come back. This immense stream 

 of religious life which, beginning far beyond the 

 horizon of earliest history, has been deflected into 

 various metaphysical and other channels — of 

 Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the like 

 — during the historical period, will once more 

 gather itself together to float on its bosom all the 

 arks and sacred vessels of human progress. Man 

 will once more feel his unity with his fellows, he 

 will feel his unity with the animals, with the moun- 

 tains and the streams, with the earth itself and the 

 slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract 

 dogma of Science or Theology, but as a living and 

 ever-present fact. Ages back this has been under- 

 stood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial 

 is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols ; 

 and long before Christianity existed, the sexual 

 and astronomical were the main forms of religion. 

 That is to say, men instinctively felt and wor- 

 shiped the great life coming to them through 

 Sex, the great life coming to them from the deeps 

 of Heaven. They deified both. They placed 

 their gods — their own human forms — in sex, 

 they placed them in the sky. And not only so, 

 but wherever they felt this kindred human life — 

 in the animals, in the ibis, the bull, the lamb, 

 the snake, the crocodile ; in the trees and flowers, 

 the oak, the ash, the laurel, the hyacinth ; in the 

 streams and water-falls, on the mountain-sides or 

 in the depths of the sea — they placed them. The 

 whole universe was full of a life which, though 

 not always friendly, was human and kindred to 



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